Those who are overreached by our cunning are far from appearing to us as ridiculous as we appear to ourselves when the cunning of others has overreached us.

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.

We often do shallow good in order to accomplish evil with impunity.

There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness.

It is as common for tastes to change as it is uncommon for traits of character.

Nothing is more contagious than example, and no man does any exceeding good or exceeding ill but it spawns new deeds of the same kind. The good we imitate through emulation, the ill through the malignity of our nature, which shame keeps locked up, but example sets free.

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