If not for that of conscience, yet at least for ambition's sake, let us reject ambition, let us disdain that thirst of honor and renown, so low and mendicant; that it makes us beg it of all sorts of people.

Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies.

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us.

Indeed, there is no such thing as an altogether ugly woman -- or altogether beautiful.

The world is but a perpetual see-saw.

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

Vexations may be petty, but they are vexations still.

Let us a little permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.

There are few men who dare to publish to the world the prayers they make to Almighty God.

God defend me from being an honest man according to the description which every day I see made by each man to his own glorification.

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

I moreover affirm that our wisdom itself, and wisest consultations, for the most part commit themselves to the conduct of chance.

Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in the agitation.

Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.

How many quarrels, and how important, has the doubt as to the meaning of this syllable Hoc produced for the world!

Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest.

Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have done. I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future.

I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.