I admire the assurance and confidence everyone has in himself, whereas there is hardly anything I am sure I know or that I dare give my word I can do.

It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.

Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter, and the seed, which our soul, more powerfully than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition.

I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that tied them together.

If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.

Examples teach us that in military affairs, and all others of a like nature, study is apt to enervate and relax the courage of man, rather than to give strength and energy to the mind.

It is equally pointless to weep because we won't be alive a hundred years from now as that we were not here a hundred years ago.