One should always have one's boots on and be ready to leave.

Man is quite insane. He wouldn?t know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.

Experience stands on its own dunghill in medicine, and reason yields it place. Medicine has always professed experience to be the touchstone of its operations.

I would like to suggest that our minds are swamped by too much study and by too much matter just as plants are swamped by too much water or lamps by too much oil; that our minds, held fast and encumbered by so many diverse preoccupations, may well lose the means of struggling free, remaining bowed and bent under the load; except that it is quite otherwise: the more our souls are filled, the more they expand; examples drawn from far-off times show, on the contrary, that great soldiers ad statesmen were also great scholars.

Rash and incessant scolding runs into custom and renders itself despised.

I look upon the too good opinion that man has of himself, as the nursing mother of all false opinions, both public and private.

The first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die ... and to live.