However often you may have done them a favour, if you once refuse they forget everything except your refusal.

Perhaps you will ask whether I can raise these three millions without difficulty. Well, nearly all my capital is invested in land, but I have some money out at interest and I can borrow without any trouble.

In the pleading of cases nothing pleases so much as brevity.

Everyone is prejudiced in favor of his own powers of discernment.

Unfinished paintings are more admired than the finished because the artist's actual thoughts are left visible.

He [Pliny the Elder] used to say that 'no book [etc] was so bad but some good might be got out of it'.

And as in men's bodies, so in government, that disease is most serious which proceeds from the head.