“Old age, especially an honored old age, has so great authority, that this is of more value than all the pleasures of youth.”
“True glory takes root, and even spreads; all false pretences, like flowers, fall to the ground; nor can any counterfeit last long.”
“I add this, that rational ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue, than education without natural ability.”
“No one can be brave who considers pain to be the greatest evil in life, or can they be temperate who considers pleasure to be the highest good.”
“Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.”
“The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.”
“Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end.”
“Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.”
“We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.”
“What sweetness is left in life, if you take away friendship? Robbing life of friendship is like robbing the world of the sun. A true friend is more to be esteemed than kinsfolk.”
“Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.”
“Nothing so cements and holds together all the parts of a society as faith or credit, which can never be kept up unless men are under some force or necessity of honestly paying what they owe to one another.”
“As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.”
“We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.”
“As fire when thrown into water is cooled down and put out, so also a false accusation when brought against a man of the purest and holiest character, boils over and is at once dissipated, and vanishes and threats of heaven and sea, himself standing unmoved.”
“Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters of opinion, and not fixed by nature.”
“Whatever is done without ostentation, and without the people being witnesses of it, is, in my opinion, most praiseworthy: not that the public eye should be entirely avoided, for good actions desire to be placed in the light; but notwithstanding this, the greatest theater for virtue is conscience.”