As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

The soul can never be corrupted with the corruption of the body, but it is like the wind which causes the sound of the organ, and which ceases to produce a good effect when a pipe is spoilt.

Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.

Nature appears to have been the cruel stepmother rather than the mother of many animals.

If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.

He who in reasoning cites authority is making use of his memory rather than of his intellect.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another.

Nature never breaks her laws.

Every loss which we incur leaves behind it vexation in the memory, save the greatest loss of all, that is, death, which annihilates the memory, together with life.

Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.

Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.

It is ordained that to the ambitious, who derive no satisfaction from the gifts of life and the beauty of the world, life shall be a cause of suffering, and they shall possess neither the profit nor the beauty of the world.

It is ill to praise, and worse to blame, the thing which you do not understand.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

That which can be lost cannot be deemed riches.

There is no doubt that truth is to falsehood as light is to darkness; and so excellent a thing is truth that even when it touches humble and lowly matters, it still incomparably exceeds the uncertainty and falsehood in which great and elevated discourses are clothed; because even if falsehood be the fifth element of our minds, notwithstanding this, truth is the supreme nourishment of the higher intellects.

Although human ingenuity may devise various inventions which, by the help of various instruments, answer to one and the same purpose, yet will it never discover any inventions more beautiful, more simple or more practical than those of nature.

In the days of thy youth seek to obtain that which shall compensate the losses of thy old age.

Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.

He who sows virtue reaps glory.

Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.

There is no human experience that can be termed true science unless it can be mathematically demonstrated. And if thou sayest that the sciences which begin and end in the mind are true, this cannot be conceded, but must be denied for many reasons, and firstly because in such mental discourses experience is eliminated, and without experience there can be no certainty.

The painter’s work will be of little merit if he takes the painting of others as his standard, but if he studies from nature he will produce good fruits.

Faults are more easily recognized in the works of others than in our own.

Men wrongly lament the flight of time, blaming it for being too swift; they do not perceive that its passage is sufficiently long, but a good memory, which nature has given to us, causes things long past to seem present.

He who thinks little errs much…

All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.

There is no doubt that truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Here is a thing which the more it is needed the more it is rejected: and this is advice, which is unwillingly heeded by those who most need it, that is to say, by the ignorant.