Cosimo de Medici

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear."

"The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing."

"I am not concerned with mere survival anymore."

"What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal."

"Fortune is the test of character."

"I have found that the greatest healers of people are time and nature."

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty."

"Art is the right hand of Nature."

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious."

"Life has been your art. Now make it your masterpiece."

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate."

"One cannot live by bread alone; one needs a little poetry."

"That it should ever come to this!"

"I have always preferred the company of the great to riches and honors."

"The highest point of my happiness is to be consulted by the greatest men of the age on the most important matters of the realm."

"Wealth is the means, not the end."

"Every man must choose between two evils."

"A word to the wise is sufficient."

"In the arena of human life, the honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action."

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

"Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear."

"The greatest wealth is a poverty of desires."

"What is the world but a stage for displaying human nature?"

"A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall."

"I have always been among those who believe that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking."

"Nothing can harm you as much as your own thoughts unguarded."

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

"The foundation of justice is good faith."