There are but very few men clever enough to know all the mischief they do.
Many men are contemptuous of riches few can give them away.
Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.
To know how to hide one's ability is great skill.
They that apply themselves to trifling matters commonly become incapable of great ones.
Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.
Only the contemptible fear contempt.
It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.
A man's happiness or unhappiness depends as much on his temperament as on his destiny.
It is from a weakness and smallness of mind that men are opinionated and we are very loath to believe what we are not able to comprehend.
It is not in the power of even the most crafty dissimulation to conceal love long, where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not.
Great souls are not those who have fewer passions and more virtues than others, but only those who have greater designs.
What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved...
Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of with the world looking on.
Women's virtue is frequently nothing but a regard to their own quiet and a tenderness for their reputation.
Some counterfeits reproduce so very well the truth that it would be a flaw of judgment not to be deceived by them.
Nature seems at each man's birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.
It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.
There is no better proof of a man's being truly good than his desiring to be constantly under the observation of good men.
Our actions seem to have their lucky and unlucky stars, to which a great part of that blame and that commendation is due which is given to the actions themselves.