We must reserve a back shop all our own entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.

Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.

The most unhappy and frail creatures are men and yet they are the proudest.

To distract myself from tiresome thoughts, I have only to resort to books; they easily draw my mind to themselves and away from other things.

Plenty and indigence depend upon the opinion every one has of them; and riches, like glory of health, have no more beauty or pleasure than their possessor is pleaded to lend them.

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

Satiety comes of too frequent repetition and he who will not give himself leisure to be thirsty can never find the true pleasure of drinking