For all the best teachers pride themselves on having a large number of pupils and think themselves worthy of a bigger audience.

We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.

While we ponder when to begin, it becomes too late to do.

Give me the boy who rouses when he is praised, who profits when he is encouraged and who cries when he is defeated. Such a boy will be fired by ambition; he will be stung by reproach, and animated by preference; never shall I apprehend any bad consequences from idleness in such a boy.

Men of quality are in the wrong to undervalue, as they often do, the practise of a fair and quick hand in writing; for it is no immaterial accomplishment.

The soul languishing in obscurity contracts a kind of rust, or abandons itself to the chimera of presumption; for it is natural for it to acquire something, even when separated from any one.

In a crowd, on a journey, at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.