As there are some flowers which you should smell but slightly to extract all that is pleasant in them ... so there are some men with whom a slight acquaintance is quite sufficient to draw out all that is agreeable; a more intimate one would be unsafe and unsatisfactory.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

Fancy is imagination in her youth and adolescence. Fancy is always excursive; imagination, not seldom, is sedate.

We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment; the course is then over, the wheel turns round but once, while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.

Wrong is but falsehood put in practice.

Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world.

Those who speak against the great do not usually speak from morality, but from envy.