“The dreadful fear of hell is to be driven out, which disturbs the life of man and renders it miserable, overcasting all things with the blackness of darkness, and leaving no pure, unalloyed pleasure.”

Confess then, naught from nothing can become, Since all must have their seeds, wherefrom to grow, Wherefrom to reach the gentle fields of air.

For out of doubt In these affairs ’tis each man’s will itself That gives the start, and hence throughout our limbs Incipient motions are diffused.

The highest summits and those elevated above the level of other things are mostly blasted by envy as by a thunderbolt.

The water hollows out the stone, not by force but drop by drop.

You may complete as many generations as you please during your life; none the less will that everlasting death await you.

What can give us more sure knowledge than our senses? How else can we distinguish between the true and the false?

Thus the sum Forever is replenished, and we live As mortals by eternal give and take. The nations wax, the nations wane away; In a brief space the generations pass, And like to runners hand the lamp of life One unto other.

All things around, convulsed with violent thunder, seem to tremble, and the mighty walls of the capacious world appear at once to have started and burst asunder.

So, little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light.

And life is given to none freehold, but it is leasehold for all.

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from.

There can be no centre in infinity.

To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease.

How many evils has religion caused! [Lat., Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum!]

To ask for power is forcing uphill a stone which after all rolls back again from the summit and seeks in headlong haste the levels of the plain.

Life feels less lonely, and that’s a big obstacle to overcome.

Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have.

I will be small in small things, great among great.

To laugh is proper to man.

A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation.

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.

Eternal life is not primarily duration but quality of life, “life to the limit.

Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.