The more necessary a thing is for living beings, the more easily it is found and the cheaper it is; the less necessary it is, the rarer and dearer it is.
One should see the world, and see himself as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed the scale is tipped to the good – he and the world is saved. When he does one evil deed the scale is tipped to the bad – he and the world is destroyed.
Contrast the experience with something worse and you cannot help feeling happy and grateful because. The change from trouble to comfort gives us more pleasure than uninterrupted comfort does.
The great sickness and the grievous evil consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true-and all the more so if the books are old.
Astrology is a disease, not a science. It is a tree under the shadow of which all sorts of superstitions thrive. Only fools and charlatans lend value to it.
The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.
