Mean-spirited mediocrities, especially those with a smattering of learning, are the most likely to be opinionated. Only strong minds know how to correct their opinions and abandon a bad position.

It is neither a great praise nor a great blame when people say a tendency is in or out of fashion. If a tendency is as it should be at one time, it is always as it should be.

It is a strength of character to acknowledge our failings and our strong points, and it is a weakness of character not to remain in harmony with both the good and the bad that is within us.

We think highly of men when we do not know the extent of their capabilities, for we always suppose that more exists when we only see half.

Self-love makes us deceive ourselves in almost all matters, to censure others, and to blame them for the same faults that we do not correct in ourselves; we do this either because we are unaware of the evil that exists within us, or because we always see our own evil disguised as a good.

It is a singular characteristic of love that we cannot hide it where it exists, or pretend it where it does not exist.

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.