Those who are themselves incapable of great crimes are ever backward to suspect others.

Gratitude is a lively sense of benefits to come.

Most men, like plants, possess hidden qualities which chance discovers.

Perfect valour consists in doing without witnesses that which we would be capable of doing before everyone.

Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests, and an exchange of good offices; it is a species of commerce out of which self-love always expects to gain something.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

Self-love is the love of a man's own self, and of everything else for his own sake. It makes people idolaters to themselves, and tyrants to all the world besides.