The pretended admission of a fault on our part creates an excellent impression.
— Quintilian
Nature herself has never attempted to effect great changes rapidly.
Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.
It is worth while too to warn the teacher that undue severity in correcting faults is liable at times to discourage a boy's mind from effort.
As regards parents, I should like to see them as highly educated as possible, and I do not restrict this remark to fathers alone.
Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.
Though ambition in itself is a vice, yet it is often the parent of virtues.
Fear of the future is worse than one's present fortune.
Everything that has a beginning comes to an end.
In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.
Where evil habits are once settled, they are more easily broken than mended.
Our minds are like our stomaches; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetite.
Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.
The perfection of art is to conceal art.
A laugh, if purchased at the expense of propriety, costs too much.
The gifts of nature are infinite in their variety, and mind differs from mind almost as much as body from body.
When we cannot hope to win, it is an advantage to yield.
When defeat is inevitable, it is wisest to yield.
To my mind the boy who gives least promise is one in whom the critical faculty develops in advance of the imagination.
It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.
A liar should have a good memory.
Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.
For it would have been better that man should have been born dumb, nay, void of all reason, rather than that he should employ the gifts of Providence to the destruction of his neighbor.
The prosperous can not easily form a right idea of misery.
God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.
It seldom happens that a premature shoot of genius ever arrives at maturity.
Nothing is more dangerous to men than a sudden change of fortune.
It is fitting that a liar should be a man of good memory.
That which prematurely arrives at perfection soon perishes.
We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.
It is much easier to try one's hand at many things than to concentrate one's powers on one thing.
Though ambition itself be a vice, yet it is often times the cause of virtues.
The mind is exercised by the variety and multiplicity of the subject matter, while the character is moulded by the contemplation of virtue and vice.
For the mind is all the easier to teach before it is set.
Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.
Forbidden pleasures alone are loved immoderately; when lawful, they do not excite desire.
While we are examining into everything we sometimes find truth where we least expected it.
A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.
To swear, except when necessary, is becoming to an honorable man.
Men, even when alone, lighten their labors by song, however rude it may be.
We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty.
Whilst we deliberate how to begin a thing, it grows too late to begin it.
While we are making up our minds as to when we shall begin, the opportunity is lost.
He who speaks evil only differs from his who does evil in that he lacks opportunity.
