The aversion to lying is often a hidden ambition to render our words credible and weighty, and to attach a religious aspect to our conversation.

A man for whom accident discovers sense, is not a rational being. A man only is so who understands, who distinguishes, who tests it.

Affected simplicity is a subtle imposture.

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.

There is an excess both in happiness and misery above our power of sensation.

We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.

He is not to pass for a man of reason who stumbles upon reason by chance but he who knows it and can judge it and has a true taste for it.