Fortune converts everything to the advantage of her favorites.

We should only affect compassion, and carefully avoid having any.

When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.

The height of ability consists in a thorough knowledge of the real value of things, and of the genius of the age in which we live.

Happiness does not consist in things themselves but in the relish we have of them; and a man has attained it when he enjoys what he loves and desires himself, and not what other people think lovely and desirable.

Death, like the sun, cannot be looked at steadily.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.