“Mon métier et mon art c’est vivre. [My craft and my skill is living.]”

“The most beautiful lives, to my mind,are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle, and without eccentricity.”

“La foiblesse de nostre condition, fait que les choses en leur simplicité et pureté naturelle ne puissent pas tomber en nostre usage...Nostre extreme volupté a quelque air de gemissement, et de plainte.”

“When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing.”

“READER, You have here an honest book; it does at the outset forewarn You that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all either to Your service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and humours, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of me. Had my intention been to seek the world's favour, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties: I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary manner, without study and artifice: for it is myself I paint. My defects are therein to be read to the life, and any imperfections and my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me. If I had lived among those nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet liberty of nature's primitive laws, I assure thee I would most willingly have painted myself quite fully and quite naked. Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book: there's no reason You should employ Your leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.”

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts,nothing helps me so much as running to my books.They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”

“The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.”