I teach that all men are mad.
You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don’t labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.
He who is upright in his way of life and free from sin.
He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.
Punishment closely follows guilt as its companion.
Be ever on your guard what you say of anybody and to whom.
Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.
Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.
Force may make hypocrites, but it can never make converts.
People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.
Ive learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
The best efforts of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.
The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.
Judges ought to be more learned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.
The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.
No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.
