I keep to old books, for they teach me something; from the new I learn very little
Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London and Canada.
The superfluous, a very necessary thing.
Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.
We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.
Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.