Affairs that depend on many rarely succeed.

Waste no time with revolutions that do not remove the causes of your complaints but simply change the faces of those in charge.

It is a great matter to be in authority over others; for authority, if it be rightly used, will make you feared beyond your actual resources.

Be careful how you do one man a pleasure which must needs occasion equal displeasure in another. For he who is thus slighted will not forget, but will think the offence to himself the greater in that another profits by it; while he who receives the pleasure will either not remember it, or will consider the favour done him less than it really was.

To relinquish a present good through apprehension of a future evil is in most instances unwise ... from a fear which may afterwards turn out groundless, you lost the good that lay within your grasp.

He is less likely to be mistaken who looks forward to a change in the affairs of the world than he who regards them as firm and stable.

Like other men, I have sought honours and preferment, and often have obtained them beyond my wishes or hopes. Yet never have I found in them that content which I had figured beforehand in my mind. A strong reason, if we well consider it, why we should disencumber ourselves of vain desires.