What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.

In the intercourse of life, we please more by our faults than by our good qualities.

The tranquility or agitation of our temper does not depend so much on the big things which happen to us in life, as on the pleasant or unpleasant arrangements of the little things which happen daily.

A man does not please long when he has only species of wit.

In all professions each affects a look and an exterior to appear what he wishes the world to believe that he is. Thus we may say that the whole world is made up of appearances.

All the passions are nothing else than different degrees of heat and cold of the blood.

We do not like to praise, and seldom praise anyone without self-interest.