In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.

Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a morecalculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.

Propriety is the least of all laws, and the most observed.

We feel good and ill only in proportion to our self-love.

What makes lovers never tire of one another is that they talk always about themselves.

We have more ability than will power, and it is often an excuse to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible.

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