It is good to be firm by temperament and pliant by reflection.

The greatest evil that fortune can bring to men is to endow them with feeble resources and yet to make them ambitious.

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

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 common excuse for those bringing misfortune on others is that they desire their good.

Lazy people are always anxious to be doing something.

It is difficult to esteem a man as highly as he would wish.