It is not enough that we should succeed, but our friends must fail as well.

A respectable man may love madly, but not foolishly.

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

If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could never harm us.

The whimsicalness of our own humor is a thousand times more fickle and unaccountable than what we blame so much in fortune.

Nothing is more contagious than example, and no man does any exceeding good or exceeding ill but it spawns new deeds of the same kind. The good we imitate through emulation, the ill through the malignity of our nature, which shame keeps locked up, but example sets free.

The greatest part of intimate confidences proceed from a desire either to be pitied or admired.