The passions often engender their contraries.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

The contempt of riches in philosophers was only a hidden desire to avenge their merit upon the injustice of fortune, by despising the very goods of which fortune had deprived them; it was a secret to guard themselves against the degradation of poverty, it was a back way by which to arrive at that distinction which they could not gain by riches.

There are people who, like new songs, are in vogue only for a time.

No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.

Some men are like ballads, that are in everyone's mouth a little while.

Love is one and the same in the original; but there are a thousand different copies of it.