“Let fortune do her worst, whatever she makes us lose, so long as she never makes us lose our honesty and our independence.”

Conceit is to nature what paint is to beauty; it is not only needless, but it impairs what it would improve.

Get your enemy to read your works in order to mend them, for your friend is so much your second self that he will judge too like you.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

When we are young, we are slavishly employed in procuring something whereby we may live comfortably when we grow old; and when we are old, we perceive it is too late to live as we proposed.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend.

Physicians are in general the most amiable companions and the best friends, as well as the most learned men I know.

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.

The Right Divine of Kings to govern wrong.

Great oaks grow from little acorns. He has a green thumb. He has green fingers. He’s sowing his wild oats. Here Ceres’ gifts in waving prospect stand, And nodding tempt the joyful reaper’s hand.

All seems infected that th’ infected spy, As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.

It often happens that those are the best people whose characters have been most injured by slanderers: as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been picking at.

Expression is the dress of thought.

The laughers are a majority.

Love the offender, yet detest the offense.

Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man’s erring judgement, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is PRIDE, the never-failing vice of fools.

It is easy at any moment to resign the possession of a great fortune; to acquire it is difficult and arduous.

Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.

Life’s a wheel of fortune and y’all can’t buy a vowel.

The result showed that fortune helps the brave.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate … can look fortune in the face.

No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.

One’s virtue is all that one truly has, because it is not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune.