Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care. - Blaise Pascal

The best books are those, which those who read them believe they themselves could have written.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

Why should I choose to divide my ethics into four rather than six? Why should I define virtue as four, or two, or one? Why as desist and resist rather than 'follow nature' or 'discharge your private business without injustice', like Plato, or anything else?
'But,' you will say, 'there everything is summed up in a word. - 'Yes, but that is no good unless you explain it.' And when you come to explain it, as soon as you open up this precept which contains all the others, out they all come in the original confusion that you wanted to avoid. Thus when they are all enclosed in one they are concealed and useless, as if they were in a box, and they only come to light in their natural confusion. Nature has laid them down, without enclosing one inside another.