However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.

Self-love, as it happens to be well or ill conducted, constitutes virtue and vice.

Innocence is lucky if it finds the same protection as guilt

Men are not only prone to forget benefits; they even hate those who have obliged them, and cease to hate those who have injured them. The necessity of revenging an injury, or of recompensing a benefit seems a slavery to which they are unwilling to submit.

Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.

To establish yourself in the world a person must do all they can to appear already established.

It is almost always a fault of one who loves not to realize when he ceases to be loved.