Our actions are neither so good nor so evil as our impulses.

Vice stirs up war, virtue fights.

Excessive distrust is not less hurtfJul than its opposite. Most men become useless to him who is unwilling to risk being deceived.

The mind is the soul's eye, not its source of power. That lies in the heart, in other words, in the passions.

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.

One promises much, to avoid giving little.

Clearness marks the sincerity of philosophers.