The greatest part of our faults are more excusable than the methods that are commonly taken to conceal them.

Unfaithfulness ought to extinguish love, and we should not be jealous when there is reason to be. Only those who give no grounds for jealousy are worthy of it.

Women can more easily conquer their passion than their coquetterie.

We may seem great in an employment below our worth, but we very often look little in one that is too big for us.

A wise man thinks it more advantageous not to join the battle than to win.

Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret.

Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a morecalculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.