The wicked are always surprised to find that the good can be clever.

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.

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.

The maxim that men are not to be praised before their death was invented by envy and too lightly adopted by philosophers.

The counsels of the old, like the winter sun, shine, but give no heat.

We are almost always guilty of the hate we encounter.

It is of no use to possess a lively wit if it is not of the right proportion: the perfection of a clock is not to go fast, but to be accurate.