Quote collection
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"We have no participation in Being, because all human nature is ever midway between being born and dying, giving off only a vague image and shadow of itself, and a weak and uncertain opinion. And if you chance to fix your thoughts on trying to grasp its essence, it would be neither more nor less than if your tried to clutch water."
"My business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk's sake."
"The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from Custom."
"Not only does the wind of accidents stir me according to its blowing, but I am also stirred and troubled by the instability of my attitude."
"What kind of truth is this which is true on one side of a mountain and false on the other?"
"We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there."
"All opinions in the world agree in this, that pleasure is our end, although they differ as to the means of attaining it."
"Pythagoras used to say that life resembles the Olympic Games: a few people strain their muscles to carry off a prize; others bring trinkets to sell to the crowd for gain; and some there are, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to look at the show and see how and why everything is done; spectators of the life of other people in order to judge and regulate their own."
"The great and glorious masterpiece of men is to live to the point. All other things-to reign, to hoard, to build-are, at most, but inconsiderable props and appendages."
"The wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms."
"For a desperate disease a desperate cure."
"My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him orderthe architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man's knowledge, not according to his own."
"There are few things on which we can pass a sincere judgement, because there are few things in which we have not, in one way or another, a particular interest."
"He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents."
"Children's games are hardly games. Children are never more serious than when they play."
"The day of your birth leads you to death as well as to life."
"We may so seize on virtue, that if we embrace it with an overgreedy and violent desire, it may become vicious."
"Experience stands on its own dunghill in medicine, and reason yields it place. Medicine has always professed experience to be the touchstone of its operations."
"I have ever loved to repose myself, whether sitting or lying, with my heels as high or higher than my head."
"Let [children] be able to do all things, and love to do only the good."