No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

I have good hope that there is something after death.

Madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.

When you swear, swear seriously and solemnly, but at the same time with a smile, for a smile is the twin sister of seriousness.

Wealth and poverty; one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

Violent pleasures which reach the soul through the body are generally of this sort-they are reliefs of pain.

Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings... the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art... So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense... madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.