A good marriage (if any there be) refuses the conditions of love and endeavors to present those of amity.

One man may have some special knowledge at first-hand about the character of a river or a spring, who otherwise knows only what everyone else knows. Yet to give currency to this shred of information, he will undertake to write on the whole science of physics. From this fault many great troubles spring.

I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of the New World by our contagion, and that we willhave sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

An orator of past times declared that his calling was to make small things appear to be grand.

The lack of wealth is easily repaired but the poverty of the soul is irreplaceable.