“If you are under obligations to many, it is prudent to postpone the recompensing of one, until it be in your power to remunerate all; otherwise you will make more enemies by what you give, than by what you withhold.”

He that is gone so far as to cut the claws of the lion, will not feel himself quite secure, until he has also drawn his teeth.

As that gallant can best affect a pretended passion for one woman who has no true love for another, so he that has no real esteem for any of the virtues can best assume the appearance of them all.

The mistakes of the fool are known to the world, but not to himself. The mistakes of the wise man are known to himself, but not to the world.

He that has energy enough to root out a vice should go further, and try to plant a virtue in its place.

Our minds are as different as our faces. We are all traveling to one destination: happiness, but few are going by the same road.

Discretion has been termed the better part of valour, and it is more certain, that diffidence is the better part of knowledge.

A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.

Wealth after all is a relative thing since he that has little and wants less is richer than he that has much and wants more.

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.

Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.

Deliberate with caution, but act with decision and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.

No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it.

Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase.

True contentment depends not upon what we have; a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander.

Men are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say.

Women do not transgress the bounds of decorum so often as men; but when they do, they go greater lengths.

Look at the flowers, and the birds in the sky, if they never worry then why should I? for he holds my life in his hands.

Nails were not enough to hold God-and-man nailed and fastened on the Cross, had not love held Him there.

We ought even to hold as a fixed principle that what I see white I believe to be black, if the superior authorities define it to be so.

For the heart that needs a dose of courage don’t run, don’t hide, don’t fear, hold on.

When you hold a grudge, you want someone else’s sorrow to reflect your level of hurt but the two rarely meet.

Nothing is more like a wise man than a fool who holds his tongue.

I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature.

For all their bitching about what’s holding them back, most people have a lot of trouble coming up with the defined dreams they’re being held from.