The reason why most women have so little sense of friendship is that this is but a cold and flat passion to those that have felt that of love.

Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.

There are more defects in temperament than in the mind.

Men more easily renounce their interests than their tastes.

Self-love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.

What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner; and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.

It is only persons of firmness that can have real gentleness. Those who appear gentle are, in general, only a weak character, which easily changes into asperity.