To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation.

There are follies as catching as contagious disorders.

We do not lack strength so much as the will to use it; and very often our imagining that things are impossible is nothing but an excuse of our own contriving, to reconcile ourselves to our own idleness.

In the human heart there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another.

One may outwit another, but not all the others.

The reason we do not let our friends see the very bottom of our hearts is not so much distrust of them as distrust of ourselves.

There are some who never would have loved if they never had heard it spoken of.