Some accidents there are in life that a little folly is necessary to help us out of.

Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.

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.

Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can; and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being.

The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.

We often in our misfortunes take that for constancy and patience which is only dejection of mind; we suffer without daring to holdup our heads, just as cowards let themselves be knocked on the head because they have not courage to strike back.

Our probity is not less at the mercy of fortune than our property.