Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property.

The punishment of a criminal is an example to the rabble; but every decent man is concerned if an innocent person is condemned.

A man reveals his character even in the simplest things he does.

Cheats easily believe others as bad as themselves; there is no deceiving them, nor do they long deceive.

He who can wait for what he desires takes the course not to be exceedingly grieved if he fails of it; he, on the contrary, who labors after a thing too impatiently thinks the success when it comes is not a recompense equal to all the pains he has been at about it.

Praise, of all things, is the most powerful excitement to commendable actions, and animates us in our enterprises.

False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.