Temper your enjoyments with prudence, lest there be written on your heart that fearful word 'satiety.'

Be as far from desiring the popular love as fearful to deserve the popular hate; ruin dwells in both: the one will hug thee to death; the other will crush thee to destruction: to escape the first, be not ambitious; to avoid the second, be not seditious.

Thy pride is but the prologue of thy shame; where vain-glory commands, there folly counsels; where pride rides, there shame lackeys.

Let the foundation of thy affection be virtue, then make the building as rich as glorious as thou canst; if the foundation be beauty or wealth, and the building virtue, the foundation is too weak for the building, and it will fall: happy is he, the palace of whose affection is founded upon virtue, walled with riches glazed with beauty, and roofed with honor.

Other vices make their own way; this makes way for all vices. He that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.

The way to subject all things to thyself is to subject thyself to reason; thou shalt govern many, if reason govern thee. Wouldst thou be crowned the monarch of a little world? command thyself.

If virtue accompany it, it is the heart's paradise; if vice associate it, it is the soul's purgatory.