What often prevents our abandoning ourselves to a single vice is, our having more than one.

In the intercourse of life, we please more by our faults than by our good qualities.

In all professions each affects a look and an exterior to appear what he wishes the world to believe that he is. Thus we may say that the whole world is made up of appearances.

Chance corrects us of many faults that reason would not know how to correct.

All who know their own minds know not their own hearts.

The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.

What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner; and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.