“The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere is to be nowhere.es”

“Marriage is like a cage one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out...”

“Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to thrust our noses into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything doubtful and undecided.”

“ 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.”

“If I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.”

“We need but little learning to live happily.”

“Truth for us nowadays is not what is, but what others can be brought to accept: just as we call money not only legal tender but any counterfeit coins in circulation.”

“If anyone gets intoxicated with his knowledge when he looks beneath him, let him turn his eyes upward toward past ages, and he will lower his horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample him underfoot. If he gets into some flattering presumption about his valor, let him remember the lives of the two Scipios, so many armies, so many nations, all of whom leave him so far behind them. No particular quality will make a man proud who balances it against the many weaknesses and imperfections that are also in him, and, in the end, against the nullity of man’s estate.”

“We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment.”

“Ease crushes us.”

“Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life.”

“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.”

“There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.”

“We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we can't be wise with another man's wisdom.”

“If virtue cannot shine bright, but by the conflict of contrary appetites, shall we then say that she cannot subsist without the assistance of vice, and that it is from her that she derives her reputation and honor?”

“To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again...books which I have read carefully a few years before. I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it.”

“All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.”

“Meditation is a powerful and full study as can effectually taste and employ themselves.”

“I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero.”

“I know no marriages which fail and come to grief more quickly than those which are set on foot by beauty and amorous desire.”

“If any one should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I feel it could no otherwise be expressed than by making answer, ‘Because it was he; because it was I.’ There is, beyond what I am able to say, I know not what inexplicable and inevitable power that brought on this union.”

“The most beautiful lives, to my mind,are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle, and without eccentricity.”

“Men have seemed miraculous to the world, in whom their wives and valets have never seen anything even worth noticing. Few men have been admired by their own households.”