With traps and obstacles and hazards confronting us on every hand, only blindness or indifference will fail to turn in all humility, for guidance or for warning, to the study of examples.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

It is good for us that we sometimes have sorrows and adversities, for they often make a man lay to heart that he is only a stranger and sojourner, and may not put his trust in any worldly thing. It is good that we sometimes endure contradictions, and are hardly and unfairly judged, when we do and mean what is good. For these things help us to be humble, and shield us from vain-glory.

An example is often a deceptive mirror,
And the order of destiny, so troubling to our thoughts,
Is not always found written in things past.

We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.

Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.

All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.

History, if it has taught us anything at all, has taught us that the strange ideas we deride today will one day be our celebrated truths.

We learn humility through accepting humiliations cheerfully.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Am I reduced to the indignity of examples?

Humiliate the reason and distort the soul...