I must accommodate my history to the hour: I may presently change, not only by fortune, but also by intention.

Let every foot have its own shoe.

I never met a man who thought his thinking was faulty.

The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.

One open way of speaking introduces another open way of speaking, and draws out discoveries, like wine and love.

I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.

Princes give mee sufficiently, if they take nothing from me, and doe me much good, if they doe me no hurt: it is all I require of them.