The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.
Necessity embitters the evils which it cannot cure.
We have neither the strength nor the opportunity to accomplish all the good and all the evil which we design.
Our actions are neither so good nor so evil as our impulses.
The greatest evil that fortune can bring to men is to endow them with feeble resources and yet to make them ambitious.
We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.