A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.

Neither love nor fire can subsist without perpetual motion; both cease to live so soon as they cease to hope, or to fear.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

It is most difficult to speak when we are ashamed of being silent.

Sometimes we think we dislike flattery, but it is only the way it is done that we dislike.

What men call friendship is no more than a partnership, a mutual care of interests, an exchange of favors - in a word, it is a sort of traffic, in which self-love ever proposes to be the gainer.

There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness.