The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.

The truest mark of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy.

Opportunity makes us known to others, but more to ourselves.

What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner; and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.

Nothing is so capable of diminishing self-love as the observation that we disapprove at one time what we approve at another.

There are some faults which, when well managed, make a greater figure than virtue itself.

There is an excess both in happiness and misery above our power of sensation.