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The secret counsels of princes are a troublesome burden to such as have only to execute them.

My appetite comes to me while eating.

Like the watermen who advance forward while they look backward.

Persons of mean understandings, not so inquisitive, nor so well instructed, are made good Christians, and by reverence and obedience, implicity believe, and abide by their belief.

Whom conscience, ne'er asleep, Wounds with incessant strokes, not loud, but deep.

He who should teach men to die, would at the same time teach them to live.

You have your face bare; I am all face.

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which to-day are fables to us!

Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are found and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their clubs into shape.

"Oh! what a vile and abject thing is man unless he can erect himself above humanity." Here is a bon mot and a useful desire, but equally absurd. For to make the handful bigger than the hand, the armful bigger then the arm, and to hope to stride further than the stretch of our legs, is impossible and monstrous. . . . He may lift himself if God lend him His hand of special grace; he may lift himself . . . by means wholly celestial. It is for our Christian religion, and not for his Stoic virtue, to pretend to this divine and miraculous metamorphosis.

One may be humble out of pride.

A wise man loses nothing, if he but save himself.

Adrian, the Emperor, exclaimed incessantly, when dying, "That the crowd of physicians had killed him."

How the Doctor's brow should smile, Crown'd with wreaths of camomile.

No one is exempt from taking nonsense; the misfortune is to do it solemnly.

There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more that two hairs, or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity. - Michael Eyquen de Montaigne,

Even opinion is of force enough to make itself to be espoused at the expense of life.

The bees pillage the flowers here and there but they make honey of them which is all their own; it is no longer thyme or marjolaine: so the pieces borrowed from others he will transform and mix up into a work all his own.

Amongst so many borrowed things, am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service.

How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputations!