[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy; research, the progress; ignorance, the end. There is, by heavens, a strong and generous kind of ignorance that yields nothing, for honour and courage, to knowledge: an ignorance to conceive which needs no less knowledge than to conceive knowledge.

Sometimes it is a good choice not to choose at all.

There is nothing so noble and so right as to play our human life well and fitly, nor anything so difficult to learn as how to livethis life well and according to Nature.

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from Custom.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

Tis the taste of effeminacy that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.