An honest man is not accountable for the vice and folly of his trade, and therefore ought not to refuse the exercise of it. It is the custom of his country, and there is profit in it. We must live by the world, and such as we find it, so make use of it.
What fear has once made me will, I am bound still to will when without fear.
Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue, but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it.
We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.
I am myself the matter of my book.
The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge.
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he, and I was I.
To smell, though well, is to stink.
For a desperate disease a desperate cure.
Saying is one thing and doing is another; we are to consider the sermon and the preacher distinctly and apart.
Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.
The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.
... whoever believes anything esteems that it is a work of charity to persuade another of it.
Most of our occupations are low comedy.... We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own.
All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.
Decency, not to dare to do that in public which it is decent enough to do in private.
A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.
To speak less of oneself than what one really is, is folly, not modesty; and to take that for current pay which is under a man's value, is pusillanimity and cowardice.
Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better employed than upon your stomach.
In order always to learn something from others (which is the finest school there can be), I observe in my travels this practice: I always steer those with whom I talk back to the things they know best.
We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.
I speak to the paper, as I speak to the first person I meet.
I love a gay and sociable wisdom, and shun harshness and austerity in behaviour, holding every surly countenance suspect.
Fear sometimes adds wings to the heels, and sometimes nails them to the ground, and fetters them from moving.
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