It is always easy enough to take up arms, but very difficult to lay them down; the commencement and the termination of war are notnecessarily in the same hands; even a coward may begin, but the end comes only when the victors are willing.

All men who would surpass the other animals should do their best not to pass through life silently like the beasts whom nature made prone, obedient to their bellies.

Now the myths represent the Gods themselves and the goodness of the Gods subject always to the distinction of the speakable and the unspeakable, the revealed and the unrevealed, that which is clear and that which is hidden: since, just as the Gods have made the goods of sense common to all, but those of intellect only to the wise, so the myths state the existence of Gods to all, but who and what they are only to those who can understand.

Poor Britons, there is some good in them after all - they produced an oyster.

Those most moved to tears by every word of a preacher are generally weak and a rascal when the feelings evaporate.

If the transmigration of a soul takes place into a rational being, it simply becomes the soul of that body. But if the soul migrates into a brute beast, it follows the body outside, as a guardian spirit follows a man. For there could never be a rational soul in an irrational being.

They envy the distinction I have won; let them therefore, envy my toils, my honesty, and the methods by which I gained it.