Quotes about caution

We are fools to think the battle is ever over. A defeated foe can delude us into letting down our guard... to our eternal sorrow.

Prudence! Prudence which is ever bidding us look forward into the future, a future which in many cases we shall never reach; here is the real source of all our troubles! How mad it is for so short-lived a creature as man to look forward into a future to which he rarely attains, while he neglects the present which is his? This madness is all the more fatal since it increases with years, and the old, always timid, prudent, and miserly, prefer to do without necessaries to-day that they may have luxuries at a hundred. Thus we grasp everything, we cling to everything; we are anxious about time, place, people, things, all that is and will be; we ourselves are but the least part of ourselves. We spread ourselves, so to speak, over the whole world, and all this vast expanse becomes sensitive. No wonder our woes increase when we may be wounded on every side. How many princes make themselves miserable for the loss of lands they never saw, and how many merchants lament in Paris over some misfortune in the Indies!

Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.

We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us.

Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.

Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.

I have always estimated that any but the most trivial connection with Hollywood, however profitable it might seem at the moment, would end in disaster, and I have stayed away from the place. I have never regretted it either.

You are a valuable subject, Brodrig. You always suspect far more than is necessary, and I have but to take half your suggested precautions to be utterly safe.