It is more often from pride than from defective understanding that people oppose established opinions: they find the best places taken in the good party and are reluctant to accept inferior ones.

The generality of men have, like plants, latent properties, which chance brings to light.

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.

The love of new acquaintance comes not so much from being weary of what we had before, or from any satisfaction there is in change, as from the distaste we feel in being too little admired by those that know us too well, and the hope of being more admired by those that know us less.

We may sooner be brought to love them that hate us, than them that love us more than we would have them do.

Women know not the whole of their coquetry.

If we had no faults, we would not derive so much pleasure from noting those of other people.