All our qualities, whether good or bad, are unstable and ambiguous, and almost all are at the mery of chance.

What makes us so bitter against people who outwit us is that they think themselves cleverer than we are.

Humility is often only feigned submission which people use to render others submissive. It is a subterfuge of pride which lowers itself in order to rise.

That which occasions so many mistakes in the computations of men, when they expect return for favors, is that the giver's pride and the receiver's cannot agree upon the value of the kindness done.

It is often hard to determine whether a clear, open, and honorable proceeding is the result of goodness or of cunning.

The great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.

Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.