The most skillful flattery is to let a person talk on, and be a listener.

Many actions calculated to procure fame are not conducive to ultimate happiness.

Nothing is more amiable than true modesty, and nothing more contemptible than the false. The one guards virtue, the other betrays it.

A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.

One would think that the larger the company is in which we are engaged, the greater variety of thoughts and subjects would be started into discourse; but, instead of this we find that conversation is never so much straightened and confined, as in numerous assemblies.

The first of all virtues is innocence; the next is modesty. If we banish modesty out of the world, she carries away with her half the virtue that is in it.

Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition.