Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual.

Is it not, then, better to be ridiculous and friendly than clever and hostile?

Contentment is natural wealth.

To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.

Those who want the fewest things are nearest to the gods.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

The hardest task needs the lightest hand or else its completion will not lead to freedom but to a tyranny much worse than the one it replaces.