Penetration has an air of divination; it pleases our vanity more than any other quality of the mind.

Fortune makes our virtues and vices visible, just as light does the objects of sight.

Silence is the best security to the man who distrusts himself.

Our good qualities expose us more to hatred and persecution than all the ill we do.

Our concern for the loss of our friends is not always from a sense of their worth, but rather of our own need of them and that we have lost some who had a good opinion of us.

Idleness and fear keeps us in the path of duty, but our virtue often gets the praise.

Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay.