When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.

Constancy in love is a perpetual inconstancy which fixes our hearts successively to all the qualities of the person loved--sometimes admiring one and sometimes another above all the rest--so that this constancy roves as far as it can, and is no better than inconstancy, confined within the compass of one person.

He is not to pass for a man of reason who stumbles upon reason by chance but he who knows it and can judge it and has a true taste for it.

Those that have had great passions esteem themselves for the rest of their lives fortunate and unfortunate in being cured of them.

That which makes the vanity of others unbearable to us is that which wounds our own.

Those who give too much attention to trifling things become generally incapable of great ones.

What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.