Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves - so how can we know anyone else?

There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

The best thing you can give children, next to good habits, are good memories.

Honesty consists of the unwillingness to lie to others; maturity, which is equally hard to attain, consists of the unwillingness to lie to oneself.

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.