“In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.”

Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.

A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.

When we cannot hope to win, it is an advantage to yield.

It is much easier to try one’s hand at many things than to concentrate one’s powers on one thing.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

Sayings designed to raise a laugh are generally untrue and never complimentary. Laughter is never far removed from derision.

To swear, except when necessary, is becoming to an honorable man.

Give bread to a stranger, in the name of the universal brotherhood which binds together all men under the common father of nature.

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

While we ponder when to begin, it becomes too late to do.

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

Satiety is a neighbor to continued pleasures.

We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.

A man who tries to surpass another may perhaps succeed in equaling in not actually surpassing him, but one who merely follows can never quite come up with him: a follower, necessarily, is always behind.