If you want enemies, excel others; if you want friends, let others excel you.

Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.

Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

There are three kinds of power,--wealth, strength, and talent; but as old age always weakens, often destroys, the two latter, the aged are induced to cling with the greater avidity to the former.

Taking things not as they ought to be, but as they are, I fear it must be allowed that Macchiavelli will always have more disciples than Jesus.

That profound firmness which enabler a man to regard difficulties but as evils to be surmounted, no matter what shape they may assume.

The enthusiast has been compared to a man walking in a fog; everything immediately around him, or in contact with him, appears sufficiently clear and luminous; but beyond the little circle of which he himself is the centre, all is mist and error and confusion.