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.

A man's happiness or unhappiness depends as much on his temperament as on his destiny.

Fortune and humor govern the world.

A good woman is a hidden treasure; who discovers her will do well not to boast about it.

Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary by sense.

In friendship, as in love, we are often more happy from the things we are ignorant of than from those we are acquainted with.

Even the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which self-love always proposes to be the gainer one wayor another.