The extreme pleasure we take in speaking of ourselves should make us apprehensive that it gives hardly any to those who listen to us.

In the human heart one generation of passions follows another; from the ashes of one springs the spark of the next.

The constancy of the wise is only the art of keeping disquietude to one's self.

Men would not live in society long if they were not each others dupes.

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.

Even the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which self-love always proposes to be the gainer one wayor another.

The health of the soul is as precarious as that of the body; for when we seem secure from passions, we are no less in danger of their infection than we are of falling ill when we appear to be well.