Most importantly: Don't adjust your results to build up the ego of the chief strategist. Especially if the strategist is you.

Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.

Those who have resources within themselves, who can dare to live alone, want friends the least, but, at the same time, best know how to prize them the most. But no company is far preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.

A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.

Riches may enable us to confer favors, but to confer them with propriety and grace requires a something that riches cannot give.

That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind.

It is far more easy to acquire a fortune like a knave, than to expend it, like a gentleman.