Gratitude is like the good faith of traders: it maintains commerce, and we often pay, not because it is just to discharge our debts, but that we may more readily find people to trust us.

Few things are needful to make the wise man happy, but nothing satisfies the fool; - and this is the reason why so many of mankind are miserable.

There are persons whose only merit consists in saying and doing stupid things at the right time, and who ruin all if they change their manners.

We own up to minor failings, but only so as to convince others that we have no major ones.

For most men the love of justice is only the fear of suffering injustice.

Pride has a greater share than goodness in the reproofs we give other people for their faults; and we chide them not so much to make them mend those faults as to make them believe that we ourselves are without fault.

Avarice misapprehends itself almost always. There is no passion which more often will miss its aim, nor upon which the present has so much influence to the prejudice of the future.