"The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve"
"Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can; and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being"
"Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty"
"The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest"
"Every one speaks well of his own heart, but no one dares speak well of his own mind"
"Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed"
"Confidence contributes more to conversation than wit"
"Conceit causes more conversation than wit"
"Being a blockhead is sometimes the best security against being cheated by a man of wit"
"Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it"
"As one grows older, one becomes wiser and more foolish"
"As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing"
"As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing"
"All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones"
"Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires"
"A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant"
"A wise man thinks it more advantageous not to join the battle than to win"
"A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice"
"A man's worth has its season, like fruit"
"A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others"
"A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter"
"We seldom praise anyone in good earnest, except such as admire us"
"We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them"
"We seldom find any person of good sense, except those who share our opinions"
"We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own"
"We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it"
"We get so much in the habit of wearing disguises before others that we finally appear disguised before ourselves"
"We easily forgive our friends those faults that do no affect us ourselves"
"We do not praise others, ordinarily, but in order to be praised ourselves"
"We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue"
"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones"
"We come altogether fresh and raw into the several stages of life, and often find ourselves without experience, despite our years"
"We are very far from always knowing our own wishes"
"We are strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others"
"We always get bored with those whom we bore"
"There are very few things impossible in themselves; and we do not want means to conquer difficulties so much as application and resolution in the use of means"
"There are very few people who are not ashamed of having been in love when they no longer love each other"
"There are various sorts of curiosity; one is from interest, which makes us desire to know that which may be useful to us; and the other, from pride which comes from the wish to know what others are ignorant of"
"There are heroes in evil as well as in good"
"There are few virtuous women who are not bored with their trade"
"There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess"
"There are but very few men clever enough to know all the mischief they do"
"There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness"
"There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices"
"The one thing people are the most liberal with, is their advice"
"The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices"
"You can find women who have never had an affair, but it is hard to find a woman who has had just one"
"Women's virtue is frequently nothing but a regard to their own quiet and a tenderness for their reputation"
"Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?"
"Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person"
