To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.

There is no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally.

Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace; there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being.

The profit we possess after study is to have become better and wiser.

Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.

To die is not to play a part in society; it is the act of a single person. Let us live and laugh among our friends; let us die and sulk among strangers.

The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts, and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.