Study rather to fill your mind than your coffers; knowing that gold and silver were originally mingled with dirt, until avarice or ambition parted them.
We are at best but stewards of what we falsely call our own; yet avarice is so insatiable that it is not in the power of liberality to content it.
As the world leads we follow.
He that will do no good offices after a disappointment must stand still, and do just nothing at all. The plough goes on after a barren year; and while the ashes are yet warm, we raise a new house upon the ruins of a former.
Home joys are blessed of heaven.
Elegance is not an ornament worthy of man.
Consider an enemy may become a friend.
It is a world of mischief that may be done by a single example of avarice or luxury. One voluptuous palate makes many more.
Men trust rather to their eyes than to their ears; the effect of precepts is therefore slow and tedious, whilst that of examples is summary and effectual.
Expediency often silences justice.
Dissembling profiteth nothing; a feigned countenance, and slightly forged externally, deceiveth but very few.
If you will fear nothing, think that all things are to be feared.
It is only the surprise and newness of the thing which makes that misfortune terrible which by premeditation might be made easy to us. For that which some people make light by sufferance, others do by foresight.
The state of that man’s mind who feels too intense an interest as to future events, must be most deplorable.
There is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.
We are as answerable for what we give as for what we receive; nay, the misplacing of a benefit is worse than the not receiving of it; for the one is another person’s fault, but the other is mine.
The law of the pleasure in having done anything for another is, that the one almost immediately forgets having given, and the other remembers eternally having received.
There is as much greatness of mind in the owning of a good turn as in the doing of it; and we must no more force a requital out of season than be wanting in it.
The man who has learned to triumph over sorrow wears his miseries as though they were sacred fillets upon his brow; and nothing is so entirely admirable as a man bravely wretched.
Haste trips up its own heels, fetters and stops itself.