The passions often engender their contraries.

It is easy to be wise on behalf of others than to be so for ourselves.

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.

It often happens that things come into the mind in a more finished form than could have been achieved after much study.

There may be talent without position, but there is no position without some kind of talent.

Nothing ought more to humiliate men who have merited great praise than the care they still take to boast of little things.

Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a morecalculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.