“Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.”

“Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]”

“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”

“We are what we are. Nothing more, nothing less. There is good and evil among every kind of people. It's the evil among us who rule now.”

“The willingness to be and to have just what God wants us to be and have, nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else, would set our hearts at rest, and we would discover the simpler life,the greater peace.”

“Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality, for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done will rather bring about his ruin than his preservation.”