When we exaggerate our friends' tenderness towards us, it is often less from gratitude than from a desire to exhibit our own virtue.

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

Philosophy easily triumphs over past and future ills; but present ills triumph over philosophy.

Women know not the whole of their coquetry.

Too great cleverness is but deceptive delicacy, true delicacy is the most substantial cleverness.

Neither love nor fire can subsist without perpetual motion; both cease to live so soon as they cease to hope, or to fear.

There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.