The Complete Essays

On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.

If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.

Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

Combien de choses nous servoyent hier d’articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd’huy? How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?

I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.

Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.

The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.

I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.

[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

Why do people respect the package rather than the man?

No wind favors he who has no destined port.

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.

It is a disaster that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and always sends you away dissatisfied and fearful, whereas stubbornness and foolhardiness fill their hosts with joy and assurance.

Other people do not see you at all, but guess at you by uncertain conjectures.

The thing I fear most is fear.

Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.

The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness.

The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.

Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness.

Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.