“We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be – even when we ourselves shall be no more. [C] ‘Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius’ [Wretched is a mind anxious about the future].”

“Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener.”

“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.”

“A man of genius belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of nature, which is always everywhere the same.”

“You never speak about yourself without loss. Your self-condemnation is always accredited, your self-praise discredited. There may be some people of my temperament, I who learn better by contrast than by example, and by flight than by pursuit. This was the sort of teaching that Cato the Elder had in view when he said that the wise have more to learn from the fools than the fools from the wise; and also that ancient lyre player who, Pausanias tells us, was accustomed to force his pupils to go hear a bad musician who lived across the way, where they might learn to hate his discords and false measures.”

“If I had even the slightest grasp upon my own faculties, I would not make essays, I would make decisions.”

There is no passion so much transports the sincerity of judgement as doth anger”

There is no passion so much transports the sincerity of judgement as doth anger”

“Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.

Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.”

“No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.”

“There is an old Greek saying that men are tormented not by things themselves but by what they think about them. If that assertion could be proved to be always true everywhere it would be an important point gained of the comforting of our wretched human condition. For if ills can only enter us through our judgemente it would seem to be in our power either to despise them or to deflect them towards the good: if the things actually do trow themselves on our mercy why do we not act as their masters and accomodate them to our advantage? If what we call evil or torment are only evil or torment insofar as our mental apprehension endows them with those qualities when it lies within our power to change those qualities. And if we did have such a choice and were free from constraint we would be curiously mad to pull in the direction which hurst us most, endowing sickness, poverty or insolence with a bad and bitter taste when we could give them a pleasent one, Fortune simply furnishing us with the matter and leaving it to us to supply the form. Let us see whether a case can be made for what we call evil not being an evil in itself or (since it amounts to the same) whether at least it is up to us to endow it with a different savour and aspect.”

“Whether we are running our home or studying or hunting or following any other sport, we should go to the very boundaries of pleasure but take good care not to be involved beyond the point where it begins to be mingled with pain.”

“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.”

“Let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my garden not being finished. (tr. Charles Cotton)”

“I know nothing about education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.”

“The time is now proper for us to reform backward; more by dissenting than by agreeing; by differing more than by consent.”

“For I make others say what I cannot say so well,... I do not count my borrowings, but, weight them.... They are all, or very nearly all, from such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me. ”

“Friendship on the contrary is enjoyed in proportion to our desire: since it is a matter of the mind, with our souls being purified by practising it”

“There is nothing more unsociable than man, and nothing more sociable: unsociable by his vice, sociable by his nature.”

“I care not so much what I am in the opinion of others, as what I am in my own.”

“We thought we were tying our marriage-knots more tightly by removing all means of undoing them;22 but the tighter we pulled the knot of constraint the looser and slacker became the knot of our will and affection. In Rome, on the contrary, what made marriages honoured and secure for so long a period was freedom to break them at will. Men loved their wives more because they could lose them; and during a period when anyone was quite free to divorce, more than five hundred years went by before a single one did”

“Our understanding is conducted solely by means of the word: anyone who falsifies it betrays public society. It is the only tool by which we communicate our wishes and our thoughts; it is our soul’s interpreter: if we lack that, we can no longer hold together; we can no longer know each other. When words deceive us, it breaks all intercourse and loosens the bonds of our polity.”

“A person of honor chooses to loss his honor rather than his consicience”

“No one is exempt from speaking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly.”

“I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, seizing my whole will, carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and that having seized his whole will, brought it back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge and lose itself in mine.”

“Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him."

“No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the misfortune is to do it solemnly”

“I do not think that there is so much wretchedness in us as vanity; we are not so much wicked as daft; we are not so much full of evil as of inanity; we are not so much pitiful as despicable.”

“No man is so exquisitely honest or upright in living, but that ten times

“The usefulness of living lies not in duration but in what you make of it. Some have lived long and lived little. See to it while you are still here. Whether you have lived enough depends not on a count of years but on your will.”

“that it was an advantage to him to be interrupted in speaking, and that his adversaries were afraid to nettle him, lest his anger should redouble his eloquence.”

“The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity.”

“To obey is the proper office of a rational soul.”

“Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment”

“Those who shake the State are easily the first to be engulfed in its destruction. The fruits of dissension are not gathered by the one who began it: he stirs and troubles the waters for other men to fish in.”

“A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.”

“If only talking to oneself did not look mad, no day would go by without my being heard growling to myself. - you silly shit!”

“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 contradictions of judgments, then, neither offend nor alter, they only rouse and exercise me. We evade correction, whereas we ought to offer and present ourselves to it, especially when it appears in the form of conference, and not of authority.”

“I myself am more ready to distort a fine saying in order to patch it on to me than to distort the thread of my argument to go in search of one. [A]”

“A man with nothing to lend should refrain from borrowing.”

“When I am playing with my cat, who knows whether she have more sport in dallying with me than I have in gaming with her?”

“We take our fetters with us; our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind; our imagination is full of them.”

“Ambition is not a vice of little people. ”

“There is hardly less torment in running a family than in running a country.”

“Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.”

“To censure my own faults in some other person seems to me no more incongruous than to censure, as I often do, another's in myself. They must be denounced everywhere, and be allowed no place of sanctuary.”

“for this present child of my brain, what I give it I give unconditionally and irrevocably, just as one does to the children of one’s body; such little good as I have already done it is no longer mine to dispose of; it may know plenty of things which I know no longer, and remember things about me that I have forgotten; if the need arose to turn to it for help, it would be like borrowing from a stranger. It is richer than I am, yet I am wiser than it. Few devotees of poetry would not have”

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