We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.

Great souls are not those who have fewer passions and more virtues than others, but only those who have greater designs.

Our distrust of another justifies his deceit.

It is more often from pride than from defective understanding that people oppose established opinions: they find the best places taken in the good party and are reluctant to accept inferior ones.

Those who are condemned to death affect sometimes a constancy and contempt for death which is only the fear of facing it; so that one may say that this constancy and contempt are to their mind what the bandage is to their eyes.

The judgments our enemies make about us come nearer to the truth than those we make about ourselves.

There are persons whose only merit consists in saying and doing stupid things at the right time, and who ruin all if they change their manners.