“Cultivated people should be superior to any consideration so sordid as a mercenary interest.”

Too great haste leads us to error.

When we are understood, we always speak well, and then all your fine diction serves no purpose.

Rest assured that there is nothing which wounds the heart of a noble man more deeply than the thought his honour is assailed.

One cannot but mistrust a prospect of felicity: one must enjoy it before one can believe in it.

The more powerful the obstacle, the more glory we have in overcoming it; and the difficulties with which we are met are the maids of honor which set off virtue.

Oh, how fine it is to know a thing or two.

We live under a prince who is an enemy to fraud, a prince whose eyes penetrate into the heart, and whom all the art of impostors can’t deceive.

The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.

I maintain, in truth, That with a smile we should instruct our youth, Be very gentle when we have to blame, And not put them in fear of virtue’s name.

Men often marry in hasty recklessness and repent afterward all their lives.

It is good food and not fine words that keeps me alive.

When you model yourself on people, you should try to resemble their good sides.

Doubts are more cruel than the worst of truths.

Malicious tongues spread their poison abroad and nothing here below is proof against them.

People spend most of their lives worrying about things that never happen.

There is no praise to bear the sort that you put in your pocket.

Cultivates the social virtues; and animates them by a great, a feasable, a speedy prospect of universal happiness,

A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?

Instead of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle round every individuality, and preach to it to keep within that, and preserve and cultivate its identity.

When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited.

By consciously meditating upon spiritual truths and cultivating personal integrity, one need never fear negative circumstances.

We Russians have assigned ourselves no other task in life but the cultivation of our own personalities, and when we’re barely past childhood, we set to work to cultivate them, those unfortunate personalities.

Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.

The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine.