Never write down your speeches beforehand; if you do, you may perhaps be a good declaimer, but will never be a debater.

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

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.

Many people come into company full of what they intend to say in it themselves, without the least regard to others; and thus charged up to the muzzle are resolved to let it off at any rate.

If we do not plant knowledge when young, it will give us no shade when we are old.

Cottages have them (falsehood and dissimulation) as well as courts, only with worse manners.

Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.