Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

A man is never more serious than when he praise himself.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

God creates the animals, man creates himself.