Keep your own secret, and get out other people's. Keep your own temper, and artfully warm other people's. Counterwork your rivalswith diligence and dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to them: and be firm without heat.

Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever; let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.

Let us not only scatter benefits, but even strew flowers for our fellow-travellers, in the rugged ways of this wretched world.

Two people cannot be alone together for upwards of half an hour without one emerging as the superior.

You will find that reason, which always ought to direct mankind, seldom does; but that passions and weaknesses commonly usurp itsseat, and rule in its stead.

I sometimes give myself admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it.

Cardinal Mazarin was a great knave, but no great man; much more cunning than able; scandalously false and dirtily greedy.