The desire which urges us to deserve praise strengthens our good qualities, and praise given to wit, valour, and beauty, tends to increase them.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

They that apply themselves to trifling matters commonly become incapable of great ones.

Very few people are acquainted with death. They undergo it, commonly, not so much out of resolution as custom and insensitivity; and most men die because they cannot help it.

Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.

The measure of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acquire it.

Flattery is a counterfeit money which, but for vanity, would have no circulation.