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

Every one speaks well of his own heart, but no one dares speak well of his own mind.

When fortune surprises us by giving us some great office without having gradually led us to expect it, or without having raised our hopes, it is well nigh impossible to occupy it well, and to appear worthy to fill it.

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.

Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.

How can we be answerable for what we shall want in the future, since we have no clear idea of what we want now?

Every one complains of a poor memory, no one of a weak judgment.