“It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.”

“Other people do not see you at all, but guess at you by uncertain conjectures.”

“And this puts me in mind of that rich gentleman of Rome, who had been solicitous, with great expense, to procure men that were excellent in all sorts of science, whom he had always attending his person, to the end, that when amongst his friends any occasion fell out of speaking of any subject whatsoever, they might supply his place, and be ready to prompt him, one with a sentence of Seneca, another with a verse of Homer, and so forth, every one according to his talent; and he fancied this knowledge to be his own, because it was in the heads of those who lived upon his bounty; as they, also, do whose learning consists in having great libraries.”

“If the pupil proves to be of so perverse a disposition that he would rather listen to some idle tale than to the account of a glorious voyage or to a wise conversation, when he hears one; if he turns away from the drum-beat that awakens young ardour in his comrades, to listen to another tattoo that summons him to a display of juggling; if he does not fervently feel it to be pleasanter and sweeter to return from a wrestling-match, dusty but victorious, with the prize in his hand, than from a game of tennis or a ball, I can see no other remedy that for his tutor to strangle him before it is too late, if there are no witnesses.”

“Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and make it part of himself, judging the boy's progress by what Plato taught about education. Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given.”

“Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.”

“Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.”