Men crowd into honorable careers without other vocation than their vanity, or at best their love of fame.

The generality of men are so bound within the sphere of their circumstances that they have not even the courage to get out of them through their ideas, and if we see a few whom, in a way, speculation over great things makes incapable of mean ones, we find still more with whom the practice of small things takes away the feeling for great ones.

The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one's opportunities and make the most of one's resources.

Our errors and our controversies, in the sphere of morality, arise sometimes from looking on men as though they could be altogether bad, or altogether good.

When an idea is not robust enough to stand expression in simple terms, it is a sign that it should be rejected.

The usual pretext of those who make others unhappy is that they do it for their own good.

Men sometimes feel injured by praise because it assigns a limit to their merit; few people are modest enough not to take offense that one appreciates them.