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

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

Clemency, which we make a virtue of, proceeds sometimes from vanity, sometimes from indolence, often from fear, and almost always from a mixture of all three.

A fashionable woman is always in love - with herself.

The distempers of the soul have their relapses, as many and as dangerous as those of the body; and what we take for a perfect cureis generally either an abatement of the same disease or the changing of that for another.

Our self-love can less bear to have our tastes than our opinions condemned.

Only the great can afford to have great defects.