All our endeavours or desires so follow from the necessity of our nature, that they can be understood either through it alone, as their proximate cause, or by virtue of our being a part of nature, which cannot be adequately conceived through itself without other individuals.

In refusing benefits caution must be used lest we seem to despise or to refuse them for fear of having to repay them in kind.

In so far as men are influenced by envy or any kind of hatred, one towards another, they are at variance, and are therefore to be feared in proportion, as they…

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.