If we have not peace within ourselves, it is in vain to seek it from outward sources.
Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.
No men are oftener wrong than those that can least bear to be so.
Though men pride themselves on their great actions often they are not the result of any great design but of chance.
If we resist our passions it is more from their weakness than from our strength.
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.
It is with an old love as it is with old age a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures.
Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests.
Reason alone is insufficient to make us enthusiastic in any matter.
On neither the sun, nor death, can a man look fixedly.
It is almost always a fault of one who loves not to realize when he ceases to be loved.
There is a kind of elevation which does not depend on fortune; it is a certain air which distinguishes us, and seems to destine us for great things; it is a price which we imperceptibly set upon ourse...
Our aversion to lying is commonly a secret ambition to make what we say considerable, and have every word received with a religious respect.
Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
Taste may change, but inclination never.
We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.
Interest speaks all sorts of tongues and plays all sorts of parts even that of disinterestedness.
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.
True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.
Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.