Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

Believe all the good you can of everyone. Do not measure others by yourself. If they have advantages which you have not, let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune. Envy no one, and you need envy no one.

We talk little when we do not talk about ourselves.

Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.

He who is as faithful to his principles as he is to himself is the true partisan.

I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.