Nature creates ability; luck provides it with opportunity.

True friendship destroys envy, and true love destroys coquetterie.

We like to read others but we do not like to be read.

Nothing is given so profusely as advice.

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.

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.

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.