“He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate, and set proud death beneath his feet, can look fortune in the face, unbending both to good and bad; his countenance unconquered.”

I scarcely know the meaning of your question; much less can I answer it.

Good men seek it by the natural means of the virtues; evil men, however, try to achieve the same goal by a variety of concupiscences, and that is surely an unnatural way of seeking the good. Don’t you agree?

So nothing is ever good or bad unless you think it so, and vice versa. All luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity.

Nothing is miserable but what is thought so, and contrariwise, every estate is happy if he that bears it be content.

If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?

If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy.

In every adversity of fortune, to have been happy is the most unhappy kind of misfortune.

The science of numbers ought to be preferred as an acquisition before all others, because of its necessity and because of the great secrets and other mysteries which there are in the properties of numbers. All sciences partake of it, and it has need of none.

He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate … can look fortune in the face.

No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.

One’s virtue is all that one truly has, because it is not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune.

Nothing is miserable unless you think it so.

Music is part of us, and either ennobles or degrades our behavior.

All fortune is good fortune; for it either rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes, and so is either useful or just.

Inconsistency is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top.

And no renown can render you well-known: For if you think that fame can lengthen life By mortal famousness immortalized, The day will come that takes your fame as well, And there a second death for you awaits.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

I am not a person who can really sit around and think about regrets because with every bad experience that you have, there is weirdly something good that comes from it.

Through the feigned fury of divine emotion, the wife of the great one will be badly wronged. Judges, wishing to condemn such a doctrine, the victim will be sacrificed to the ignorant people.

French people are Italian people in a bad mood.

For evil deeds may better than bad words be borne.

It’s never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesn’t hurt you.

All good novelists have bad memories.