To please the many is to displease the wise.

The usual disease of princes, grasping covetousness, had made them suspicious and quarrelsome neighbors.

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

For he who gives no fuel to fire puts it out, and likewise he who does not in the beginning nurse his wrath and does not puff himself up with anger takes precautions against it and destroys it.

It is the admirer of himself, and not the admirer of virtue, that thinks himself superior to others.

A Roman divorced from his wife, being highly blamed by his friends, who demanded, "Was she not chaste? Was she not fair? Was she not fruitful?" holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was not new and well made. "Yet," added he, "none of you can tell where it pinches me.''

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.