The truest comparison we can make of love is to liken it to a fever; we have no more power over the one than the other, either as to its violence or duration.

What makes lovers never tire of one another is that they talk always about themselves.

Love, like fire, cannot subsist without constant impulse; it ceases to live from the moment it ceases to hope or to fear.

The most brilliant fortunes are often not worth the littleness required to gain them.

When great men permit themselves to be cast down by the continuance of misfortune, they show us that they were only sustained by ambition, and not by their mind; so that PLUS a great vanity, heroes are made like other men.

Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret.

What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.