All our dignity lies in our thoughts.

An advocate who has been well paid in advance will find the cause he is pleading all the more just.

Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.

It is superstitious to put one's hopes in formalities, but arrogant to refuse to submit to them.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make. Let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds. It will oftenest be seen that he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous.