No man is more than another unless he does more than another.

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience.

I do not believe that the Good Lord plays dice.

What is bought is cheaper than a gift.

One of the most considerable advantages the great have over their inferiors is to have servants as good as themselves.

Good painter imitates nature, bad ones spews it up.