It is impossible to love a second time what we have really ceased to love.

Weak people cannot be sincere.

Nature seems at each man's birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.

We often act treacherously more from weakness than from a fixed motive.

We often select envenomed praise which, by a reaction upon those we praise, shows faults we could not have shown by other means.

What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.

The only good copies are those which make us see the absurdity of bad originals.