Most men, like plants, possess hidden qualities which chance discovers.

One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.

What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner; and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.

What makes false reckoning, as regards gratitude, is that the pride of the giver and the receiver cannot agree as to the value of the benefit.

The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally tobe nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.

Silence is the best tactic for he who distrusts himself.

Flattery is a base coin which is current only through our vanity.