The head does not know how to play the part of the heart for long.

We are easily comforted for the misfortunes of our friends, when those misfortunes give us an occasion of expressing our affection and solicitude.

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

The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.

Moderation is an ostentatious proof of our strength of character.

The sicknesses of the soul have their ups and downs like those of the body; what we take to be a cure is most often merely a respite or change of disease.

What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.