The great blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and, like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it.

Virtue depends partly upon training and partly upon practice; you must learn first, and then strengthen your learning by actions.

There's no delight in owning anything unshared.

What madness it is for a man to starve himself to enrich his heir, and so turn a friend into an enemy! For his joy at your death will be proportioned to what you leave him.

The most onerous slavery is to be a slave to oneself.

Consider an enemy may become a friend.

Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things-eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies-since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.