The rattle is a toy suited to the infant mind, and education is a rattle or toy for children of larger growth.

Virtue makes us aim at the right end, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means.

A life of wealth and many belongings is only a means to happiness. Honor, power, and success cannot be happiness because they depend on the whims of others, and happiness should be self-contained, complete in itself.

Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal.

For the more limited, if adequate, is always preferable.

Democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy. For in oligarchies there is the double danger of the oligarchs falling out among themselves and also with the people; but in democracies there is only the danger of a quarrel with the oligarchs. No dissension worth mentioning arises among the people themselves. And we may further remark that a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government.

Not to get what you have set your heart on is almost as bad as getting nothing at all.