To be too dissatisfied with ourselves is a weakness. To be too satisfied with ourselves is a stupidity.

It is such a great fault to talk too much that, in business and conversation, if what is good is also brief, it is doubly good, and one gains by brevity what one often loses by an excess of words.

True merit does not depend on the times or on fashion. Those who have no other advantage than courtly manners lose it when they are away from court. But good sense, knowledge, and wisdom make their possessors knowledgeable and beloved in all ages and in all times.

Virtue is not always where it seems to be. People sometimes acknowledge favors only to maintain their reputations, and to make themselves more impudently ungrateful for favors that they do not wish to acknowledge.

Although we should not love our friends for the good that they do us, it is a sign that they do not love us much if they do not do us good when they have the power to do so.

When an opinionated person starts to challenge something, his mind shuts out all that could clear up the matter. The argument irritates him, however just it might be, and it seems that he is afraid of discovering the truth.

Sometimes we praise the way things used to be in order to blame the present, and we esteem what is no longer in order to scorn what is.