My esoteric doctrine, is that if you entertain any doubt, it is safest to take the unpopular side in the first instance. Transit f...rom the unpopular, is easy ... but from the popular to the unpopular is so steep and rugged that it is impossible to maintain it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your friends praise your abilities to the skies, submit to you in argument, and seem to have the greatest deference for you; but, ...though they may ask it, you never find them following your advice upon their own affairs; nor allowing you to manage your own, without thinking that you should follow theirs. Thus, in fact, they all think themselves wiser than you, whatever they may say.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It wounds a man less to confess that he has failed in any pursuit through idleness, neglect, the love of pleasure, etc., etc., whi...ch are his own faults, than through incapacity and unfitness, which are the faults of his nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ...ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wealth is so much the greatest good that Fortune has to bestow that in the Latin and English languages it has usurped her name.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »