Handling and use by able minds give value to a language, not so much by innovating as by filling it out with more vigorous and varied services, by stretching and bending it.
This emperor was arbiter of the whole world at nineteen, and yet would have a man to be thirty before he could be fit to determine a dispute about a gutter.
An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.
To learn that we have said or done a foolish thing, that is nothing; we must learn that we are nothing but fools, a far broader and more important lesson.
Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.
Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.
So much din from so many philosophical brainboxes! Trust in your philosophy now! Boast that you are the one who has found the lucky bean in your festive pudding!
Unless a man feels he has a good enough memory, he should never venture to lie.
The Stoics forbid this emotion to their sages as being base and cowardly.
Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.
No pleasure has any savor for me without communication.
A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.
To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.
Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
If it lay in my power to make myself feared, I had rather make myself beloved.
Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener.
Without doubt, it is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together.
It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.
It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.
The world is but a perpetual see-saw.
My art and profession is to live.
If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.
No passion disturbs the soundness of our judgement as anger does.
I seek in the reading of my books only to please myself by an irreproachable diversion; or if I study it is for no other science than that which treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and live well.
I have not seen anywhere in the world a more obvious malformed person and miracle than myself. Through use and time we become conditioned to anything strange; but the more I become familiar with and know myself, the more my deformity amazes me and the less I understand myself.
Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.
Don't discuss yourself, for you are bound to lose; if you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.
Neither good nor ill is done to us by Fortune: she merely offers us the matter and the seeds: our soul, more powerful than she is, can mould it or sow them as she pleases, being the only cause and mistress of our happy state or our unhappiness.
One must be a little foolish if one does not want to be even more stupid.
Better to be tentative than to be recklessly sure- to be an apprentice at sixty, than to present oneself as a doctor at ten.
If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be explained by replying: 'Because it was he; because it was me.
Happy are they who can please and delight their senses with things insensate—and who can live off their death.
Philosophy believes she has not made a bad use of her resources when she has bestowed on Reason sovereign mastery over our soul and authority to bridle our appetites.
I would rather let affairs break their neck than twist my faith for the sake of them.
In our time the most warlike nations are the most rude and ignorant.
The man who establishes his argument by noise and command knows that his reason is weak.
I keep telling myself: anything that can be done some other day can be done today.
It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.
Experience has further taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.
I once took pleasure some place in seeing men, through piety, take a vow of ignorance, as of chastity, poverty, penitence. It is also castrating our disorderly appetites, to blunt that cupidity that pricks us on to the study of books, and to deprive the soul of that voluptuous complacency which tickles us with the notion of being learned.
No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times.
I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.
Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.
As an enemy is made more fierce by our flight, so Pain grows proud to see us knuckle under it. She will surrender upon much better terms to those who make head against her.
The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One.
In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. Yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, such as the philosopher Herillus, who find in it the sovereign good and think it has the power to make us wise and happy.
The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.
