No road is to long for him who advances slowly and does not hurry and no attainment is beyond his reach who equips himself with patience to achieve it

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.

How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude!

A mediocre mind thinks it writes divinely; a good mind thinks it writes reasonably.

Pure friendship is something which men of an inferior intellect can never taste.

False glory is the rock of vanity; it seduces men to affect esteem by things which they indeed possess, but which are frivolous, and which for a man to value himself on would be a scandalous error.