Prudent and active men, who know their strength and use it with limit and circumspection, alone go far in the affairs of the world.

We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created.

That is the way of youth and life in general: that we do not understand the strategy until after the campaign is over.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

Those only obtain love, for the most part, who seek it not.

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.

To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.