Consolation for unhappiness can often be found in a certain satisfaction we get from looking unhappy.

Self-love, as it happens to be well or ill conducted, constitutes virtue and vice.

It is only persons of firmness that can have real gentleness. Those who appear gentle are, in general, only a weak character, which easily changes into asperity.

A man may be sharper than another, but not than all others.

Imagination could never invent the number of different contradictions that exist innately in each person's heart.

What men call friendship is no more than a partnership, a mutual care of interests, an exchange of favors - in a word, it is a sort of traffic, in which self-love ever proposes to be the gainer.

Coquetry is the essential characteristic, and the prevalent humor of women; but they do not all practice it, because the coquetry of some is restrained by fear or by reason.