Let no one trust so entirely to natural prudence as to persuade himself that it will suffice to guide him without help from experience.

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.

Experience has always shown, and reason also, that affairs which depend on many seldom succeed.

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.

How much luckier than all the rest of mankind are the astrologers who, if they tell one truth among a hundred lies, obtain so much credit that even their lies are believed.

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

I know no man who feels deeper disgust than I do at the ambition, avarice, and profligacy of the priesthood, as well because every one of these vices is odious in itself, as because each of them separately and all of them together are utterly abhorrent in men making profession of a life dedicated to God.