Strength and weakness of mind are misnomers; they are really nothing but the good or bad health of our bodily organs.

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.

Happiness does not consist in things themselves but in the relish we have of them; and a man has attained it when he enjoys what he loves and desires himself, and not what other people think lovely and desirable.

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

Female gossips are generally actuated by active ignorance.

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

We often make use of envenomed praise, that reveals on the rebound, as it were, defects in those praised which we dare not exposeany other way.