Look at those whose good fortune people gather to see: they are choked by their own blessings. How many find their riches a burden! How many burst a blood vessel by their eloquence and their daily striving to show off their talents!

Human greatness is not discovered until it is tested; we must be hardened against fortune by fortune itself

The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.

If you look on wealth as a thing to be valued you’ll always fancy yourself to be short of the things you need to the extent to which you lag behind what others have.