"Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are formed and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their cubs into form."

"He that I am reading seems always to have the most force."

"Why may not a goose say thus: "All the parts of the universe I have an interest in: the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me; the stars have their influence upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters; there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favourably as me. I am the darling of Nature! Is it not man that keeps and serves me?""

"Apollo said that every one's true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be."

"'T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past."

"The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould…. The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes."

"How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputation!"

"Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens."

"She [virtue] requires a rough and stormy passage; she will have either outward difficulties to wrestle with, ... or internal difficulties."

"There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants."

"The only good histories are those that have been written by the persons themselves who commanded in the affairs whereof they write."

"Some impose upon the world that they believe that which they do not; others, more in number, make themselves believe that they believe, not being able to penetrate into what it is to believe."

"When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?"

"The mariner of old said to Neptune in a great tempest, "O God! thou mayest save me if thou wilt, and if thou wilt thou mayest destroy me; but whether or no, I will steer my rudder true.""

"The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us."

"What if he has borrowed the matter and spoiled the form, as it oft falls out?"

"It would be better to have no laws at all than to have them in such profusion as we do."

"In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain, and the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore let us again charge at it in this place"

"Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do."

"Plato says, "'Tis to no purpose for a sober man to knock at the door of the Muses;" and Aristotle says "that no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of folly.""

"For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits."

"He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents."

"For a desperate disease a desperate cure."

"Si, avons nous beau monter sur des échasses, car sur des échasses encore faut-il marcher de nos jambes. Et au plus élevé trône du monde, si ne sommes assis que sur notre cul."

"‘Tis a good word and a profitable desire, but withal absurd; for to make the handle bigger than the hand, the cubic longer than the arm, and to hope to stride further than our legs can reach, is both impossible and monstrous; or that man should rise above himself and humanity; for he cannot see but with his eyes, nor seize but with his hold. He shall be exalted, if God will lend him an extraordinary hand; he shall exalt himself, by abandoning and renouncing his own proper means, and by suffering himself to be raised and elevated by means purely celestial. It belongs to our Christian faith, and not to the stoical virtue, to pretend to that divine and miraculous metamorphosis."

"God never sends evils"

"J'ai seulement fait ici un amas de fleurs étrangères, n'y ayant fourni du mien que le filet à les lier."

"There is no wish more natural than the wish to know."

"Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself."

"It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other."

"And not to serve for a table-talk."

"I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself."

"It (marriage) happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out."

"Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition — and perchance to some excess — I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond."

"Non pudeat dicere, quod non pudet sentire: "Let no man be ashamed to speak what he is not ashamed to think.""

"Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie."

"Chaque homme porte la forme, entière de l'humaîne condition."

"For my own part, I may desire in general to be other than I am; I may condemn and dislike my whole form, and beg of Almighty God for an entire reformation, and that He will please to pardon my natural infirmity: but I ought not to call this repentance, methinks, no more than the being dissatisfied that I am not an angel or Cato. My actions are regular, and conformable to what I am and to my condition; I can do no better; and repentance does not properly touch things that are not in our power; sorrow does.. I imagine an infinite number of natures more elevated and regular than mine; and yet I do not for all that improve my faculties, no more than my arm or will grow more strong and vigorous for conceiving those of another to be so."

"A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid."

"Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself."

"I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it."

"I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old."

"The oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried."

"Few men have been admired by their own households."

"At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down, whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcile myself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself by so doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so much the better of my disease. And I have yet less need of a notary or counsellor than of a physician."

"To which we may add this other Aristotelian consideration, that he who confers a benefit on any one loves him better than he is beloved by him again."

"Basing all his doctrines upon the presence of the Supreme Mind, Plato taught that the nous, spirit, or rational soul of man, being "generated by the Divine Father," possessed a nature kindred, or even homogeneous, with the Divinity, and was capable of beholding the eternal realities. This faculty of contemplating reality in a direct and immediate manner belongs to God alone; the aspiration for this knowledge constitutes what is really meant by philosophy — the love of wisdom. The love of truth is inherently the love of good; and so predominating over every desire of the soul, purifying it and assimilating it to the divine, thus governing every act of the individual, it raises man to a participation and communion with Divinity, and restores him to the likeness of God. "This flight," says Plato in the Theætetus, "consists in becoming like God, and this assimilation is the becoming just and holy with wisdom." (Before the Veil, xiii)"

"Plato could not accept a philosophy destitute of spiritual aspirations; the two were at one with him. For the old Grecian sage there was a single object of attainment: real knowledge. He considered those only to be genuine philosophers, or students of truth, who possess the knowledge of the really-existing, in opposition to the mere seeming; of the always-existing, in opposition to the transitory; and of that which exists permanently, in opposition to that which waxes, wanes, and is developed and destroyed alternately. "Beyond all finite existences and secondary causes, all laws, ideas, and principles, there is an INTELLIGENCE or MIND [nou'", nou, the spirit], the first principle of all principles, the Supreme Idea on which all other ideas are grounded; the Monarch and Lawgiver of the universe; the ultimate substance from which all things derive their being and essence, the first and efficient Cause of all the order, and harmony, and beauty, and excellency, and goodness, which pervades the universe — who is called, by way of preëminence and excellence, the Supreme Good, the God (ὁ qeò") 'the God over all' (ὁ epi pasi qeò")." (Cocker: "Christianity and Greek Philosophy," xi., p. 377.) He is not the truth nor the intelligence, but "the father of it." Though this eternal essence of things may not be perceptible by our physical senses, it may be apprehended by the mind of those who are not willfully obtuse. (Before the Veil, xi/xii)"