If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than our strength.

We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.

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

The only thing that should astonish us is that anything can yet astonish us.

Our temper sets a price upon every gift that we receive from fortune.

Idleness and constancy fix the mind to what it finds easy and agreeable. This habit always confines and cramps up our knowledge; and no one has ever taken the trouble to stretch and carry his understanding as far as it could go.

The health of the soul is something we can be no more sure of than that of the body; and though a man may seem far from the passions, yet he is in as much danger of falling into them as one in a perfect state of health of having a fit of sickness.