The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death.

As great enmities spring from great friendships, and mortal distempers from vigorous health, so do the most surprising and the wildest frenzies from the high and lively agitations of our souls.

It is for little souls, that truckle under the weight of affairs, not to know how clearly to disengage themselves, and not to know how to lay them aside and take them up again.

Wine is the benevolent god, who gives back gaiety to men and restores youth to the old.

Necessity is a violent school-mistress.

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things, and one part is no less necessary than the other.

I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers and only the thread that bonds them is my own.