Petrarch

“Five enemies of peace inhabit with us - avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.”

“A short cut to riches is to despise riches.”

“Man has no greater enemy than himself.”

“It is more honorable to be raised to a throne than to be born to one. Fortune bestows the one, merit obtains the other.”

“To be able to say how much you love is to love but little.”

“How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation from the rocks of ignorance.”

“Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.”

“Books have led some to learning and others to madness.”

“Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.”

“Where you are is of no moment, but only what you are doing there. It is not the place that ennobles you, but you the place.”

“The time will come when our successors will wonder how we could have been ignorant of things so obvious.”

“My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age.”

“Love is the crowning grace of humanity.”

“I desire to be prudent and to promise nothing, but I hope for the best.”

“Continued work and application form my soul's nourishment. So soon as I commence to rest, I kappear to myself to die.”

“For what is the purpose of knowing many things if, when you have learned them, you do nothing?”

“How vain is it to weary ourselves with that which is impossible to acquire.”

“I rejoiced in my progress, mourned my weaknesses, and commiserated the universal instability of human conduct.”

“Events appear sad, pleasant, or painful, not so much because they are so in reality, as because we believe them to be so and the light in which we look at them.”