Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils.

Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed that one is adversity.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

Rome was in the most dangerous inclination to change on account of the unequal distribution of wealth and property, those of highest rank and greatest spirit having impoverished themselves by shows, entertainments, ambition of offices, and sumptuous buildings, and the riches of the city having thus fallen into the hands of mean and low-born persons. So that there wanted but a slight impetus to set all in motion, it being in the power of every daring man to overturn a sickly commonwealth.

Education and study, and the favors of the muses, confer no greater benefit on those that seek them than these humanizing and civilizing lessons, which teach our natural qualities to submit to the limitations prescribed by reason, and to avoid the wildness of extremes.

Character is simply habit long continued.

God alone is entirely exempt from all want of human virtues, that which needs least is the most absolute and divine.