Nothing is so great an adversary to those who make it their business to please as expectation.

It is not easy to distinguish between true and false affection, unless there occur one of those crises in which, as gold is tried by fire, so a faithful friendship may be tested by danger.

The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.

The man who backbites an absent friend, nay, who does not stand up for him when another blames him, the man who angles for bursts of laughter and for the repute of a wit, who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret -- that man is black at heart: mark and avoid him.

Apollo, sacred guard of earth's true core, Whence first came frenzied, wild prophetic word.

This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.

The greatest incitement to guilt is the hope of sinning with impunity.