The more one loves a mistress, the more one is ready to hate her.

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.

Affected simplicity is an elegant imposture.

We love everything on our own account; we even follow our own taste and inclination when we prefer our friends to ourselves; and yet it is this preference alone that constitutes true and perfect friendship.

The hunger for applause is the source for all conscious literature and heroism

What is perfectly true is perfectly witty.

Nothing ought in reason to mortify our self-satisfaction more that the considering that we condemn at one time what we highly approve and commend at another.