The love of popularity holds you in a vice.

The smell of profit is clean and sweet, whatever the source.

Now we suffer the evils of a long peace; luxury more cruel than war broods over us and avenges a conquered world.

No man becomes bad all at once.

From where can your authority and license as a parent come from, when you who are old, do worse things?

When talent fails, indignation writes the verse.

Ask for a valiant heart which has banished the fear of death, which looks upon length of days as one of the least of nature's gifts; which is able to suffer every kind of hardship, is proof against anger, craves for nothing, and reckons the trials and gruelling labours of Hercules as more desirable blessings than the amorous ease and the banquets and cushions of Sardanapallus. The things that I recommend you can grant to yourself.