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

Weakness of character is the only defect which cannot be amended.

Men's happiness and misery depends altogether as much upon their own humor as it does upon fortune.

Heat of blood makes young people change their inclinations often, and habit makes old ones keep to theirs a great while.

It often happens that things come into the mind in a more finished form than could have been achieved after much study.

We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them.

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.