Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sighs are the signs of its deepest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.

The opinions of the misanthropical rest upon this very partial basis, that they adopt the bad faith of a few as evidence of the worthlessness of all.

Weakness ineffectually seeks to disguise itself,--like a drunken man trying to show how sober he is.

There are some kinds of men who cannot pass their time alone; they are the flails of occupied people.(Bonald, M.} There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.