Men who have seen life and death... as an unbroken continuum, the swinging pendulum, have been able to move as freely into death as they walked through life. Socrates went to the grave almost perplexed by his companions' tears.
You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.
But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor.
Ask a toad what is beauty....; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat head, a yellow belly and a brown back.
Do you think... that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?
It is ourselves alone that make our days lucky or unlucky. Away, then, with a vain prejudice, the invention of the priesthood, which has been transmitted by our ancestors to an ignorant people.