The most brilliant fortunes are often not worth the littleness required to gain them.

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.

We have not enough strength to follow all our reason.

Boredom ... causes us to neglect more duties than does interest.

Nothing is more contagious than example, and no man does any exceeding good or exceeding ill but it spawns new deeds of the same kind. The good we imitate through emulation, the ill through the malignity of our nature, which shame keeps locked up, but example sets free.

Love's greatest miracle is the curing of coquetry.

We frequently are troublesome to others, when we think it impossible for us ever to be so.