“Enough words, little wisdom.”

All men who would surpass the other animals should do their best not to pass through life silently like the beasts whom nature made prone, obedient to their bellies.

The fame that goes with wealth and beauty is fleeting and fragile; intellectual superiority is a possession glorious and eternal.

It is always easy to begin a war, but very difficult to stop one.

There were few who preferred honor to money.

The firmest friendship is based on an identity of likes and dislikes.

Each man the architect of his own fate.

Small communities grow great through harmony, great ones fall to pieces through discord.

Fame is the shadow of passion standing in the light.

Before you act consider; when you have considered, tis fully time to act.

Everything destroyed is either resolved into the elements from which it came, or else vanishes into not-being. If things are resolved into the elements from which they came, then there will be others: else how did they come into being at all?

Fortune rules in all things, and advances and depresses things more out of her own will than right and justice.

Prosperity tries the souls even of the wise.

All those who offer an opinion on any doubtful point should first clear their minds of every sentiment of dislike, friendship, anger or pity.

The higher your station, the less your liberty.

The glory of riches and of beauty is frail and transitory; virtue remains bright and eternal.

Sovereignty is easily preserved by the very arts by which it was originally created. When, however, energy has given place to indifference, and temperance and justice to passion and arrogance, then as the morals change so changes fortune.

Words indeed are but the signs and counters of knowledge, and their currency should be strictly regulated by the capital which they represent.

That is why I used the word normative above, a term derived from statistics, simply meaning what most people do.

Mere air, these words, but delicious to hear.

Languages exist by arbitrary institutions and conventions among peoples; words, as the dialecticians tell us, do not signify naturally, but at our pleasure.

The Germans have a word for it: Sitzfleisch. Staying power. Winning by sticking your ass to the seat and not leaving until after it’s over.

Although only breath, words which I command are immortal.

May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.

Pantagruel was telling me that he believed the queen had given the symbolic word used among her subjects to denote sovereign good cheer, when she said to her tabachins, A panacea.