What mankind wants is not talent; it is purpose.

Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud--and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.

The prudent person may direct a state, but it is the enthusiast who regenerates or ruins it

Love creates, love cements, love enters and harmonizes all things.

Fortune is said to be blind, but her favorites never are. Ambition has the eye of the eagle, prudence that of the lynx; the first looks through the air, the last along the ground.

A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool.

Julius Caesar owed two millions when he risked the experiment of being general in Gaul. If Julius Caesar had not lived to cross the Rubicon, and pay off his debts, what would his creditors have called Julius Caesar?