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.

What makes vanity so insufferable to us, is that it hurts our own.

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

Many men are contemptuous of riches; few can give them away.

However greatly we distrust the sincerity of those we converse with, yet still we think they tell more truth to us than to anyone else.

The happiness and unhappiness of men depends as much on their ethics as on fortune.

To understand matters rightly we should understand their details; and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.