There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man, the one by his vice, the other by his nature.

And Antisthenes, in my opinion, did not give him a satisfactory answer, who reproached him with frequenting ill company, by saying that the physicians lived well enough amongst the sick, for if they contribute to the health of the sick, no doubt but by the contagion, continual sight of, and familiarity with diseases, they must of necessity impair their own.
Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one's ease: but men do not always take the right way.

They often think they have totally taken leave of all business, when they have only exchanged one employment for another: there is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.

Wherever the mind is perplexed, it is in an entire disorder, and domestic employments are not less troublesome for being less important.

Moreover, for having shaken off the court and the exchange, we have not taken leave of the principal vexations of life: "Ratio et prudentia curas, Non locus effusi late maris arbiter, aufert;" ["Reason and prudence, not a place with a commanding view of the great ocean, banish care."-- Horace, Ep., i.