Constancy in love is a perpetual inconstancy which fixes our hearts successively to all the qualities of the person loved--sometimes admiring one and sometimes another above all the rest--so that this constancy roves as far as it can, and is no better than inconstancy, confined within the compass of one person.

We have more indolence in the mind than in the body.

It is with an old love as it is with old age a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures.

Customary use of artifice is the sign of a small mind, and it almost always happens that he who uses it to cover one spot uncovers himself in another.

Our desires always disappoint us; for though we meet with something that gives us satisfaction, yet it never thoroughly answers our expectation. [However disappointment can always be removed if we remember it could have turned out worse.]

Love, all agreeable as it is, charms more by the fashion in which it displays itself, than by its own true merit.

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.