“The dress does not make the monk.”

Ignorance is the mother of all evils.

A child is not a vase to be filled, but a fire to be lit.

How can I govern others, who can’t even govern myself?

I drink eternally. For me it is an eternity of drinking, and a drinking up of eternity.

Giving words is an act of lovers.

Such is the nature and make-up of the French that they are only good at the start. Then they are worse than devils, but, given time, they’re less than women.

A certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune.

In their rules there was only one clause: Do what you will.

Can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment.

Strike the iron whilst it is hot.

Nature made the day for exercise, work and seeing to one’s business; and … it provides us with a candle, which is to say the bright and joyous light of the sun.

When undertaking marriage, everyone must be the judge of his own thoughts, and take counsel from himself.

I drink for the thirst to come.

A man of good sense always believes what he is told, and what he finds written down.

Never did a great man hate good wine.

A good intention does not mean honor.

It was a miracle; it was all a miracle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror.

Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men and women are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society.

Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have be the same person. (p. 35)

When the saint ceases to seek after holiness, purity, righteousness, truth; when he ceases to pray, stops reading the Word and gives way to carnal appetites, then it is that Satan comes.

I am a count, not a saint.

The conversion of a soul is the miracle of a moment, but the manufacture of a saint is the task of a lifetime.

You can watch the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Eckhart Tolle or any number of other masters. Their teachings are available and we must celebrate that.

As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.