Honest people will respect us for our merit: the public, for our luck.

Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrust himself.

We rarely think people have good sense unless they agree with us.

We have not enough strength to follow all our reason.

If we judge love by most of its effects, it resembles rather hatred than affection.

Nothing is more contagious than example, and no man does any exceeding good or exceeding ill but it spawns new deeds of the same kind. The good we imitate through emulation, the ill through the malignity of our nature, which shame keeps locked up, but example sets free.

That which occasions so many mistakes in the computations of men, when they expect return for favors, is that the giver's pride and the receiver's cannot agree upon the value of the kindness done.