The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.

It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.