One forgives to the degree that one loves.
Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.
Nothing is so infectious as example.
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.
We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of others.
There are few virtuous women who are not bored with their trade.
Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.
If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than our strength.
We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.
However glorious an action in itself, it ought not to pass for great if it be not the effect of wisdom and intention.
There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.
One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines.
He is not to pass for a man of reason who stumbles upon reason by chance but he who knows it and can judge it and has a true taste for it.
Perfect Valor is to do, without a witness, all that we could do before the whole world.
Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.
The passions are the only orators which always persuade.
A man who finds no satisfaction in himself seeks for it in vain elsewhere.
Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.
What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.
Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.