The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods. First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds. Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.
Nothing is to be preferred before justice.
The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him. When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love. See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all. Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence. I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.