“Desire is the essence of a man.”
“We feel and know that we are eternal.”
“Will and intellect are one and the same.”
“Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.”
“All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”
“Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.”
“None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.”
“The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.”
“Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.”
“Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.”
“I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.”
“Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.”
“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
“Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.”
“Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.”
“Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.”
“To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.”
“I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.”