445.—Weakness is more hostile to virtue than vice.
446.—What makes the grief of shame and jealousy so acute is that vanity cannot aid us in enduring them.
447.—Propriety is the least of all laws, but the most obeyed.
[Honour has its supreme laws, to which education is bound to conform....Those things which honour forbids are more rigorously forbidden when the laws do not concur in the prohibition, and those it commands are more strongly insisted upon when they happen not to be commanded by law.—Montesquieu, {The Spirit Of Laws, }b. 4, c. ii.]
448.—A well-trained mind has less difficulty in submitting to than in guiding an ill-trained mind.
449.—When fortune surprises us by giving us some great office without having gradually led us to expect it, or without having raised our hopes, it is well nigh impossible to occupy it well, and to appear worthy to fill it.
450.—Our pride is often increased by what we retrench from our other faults.
["The loss of sensual pleasures was supplied and compensated by spiritual pride."—Gibbon. Decline And Fall, chap. xv.]
451.—No fools so wearisome as those who have some wit.
452.—No one believes that in every respect he is behind the man he considers the ablest in the world.