Gratitude is a lively sense of benefits to come.

When love becomes labored we welcome an act of infidelity towards ourselves to free us from fidelity.

A certain harmony should be kept between actions and ideas if we want to fully develop the effects they can produce.

Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.

The world more often rewards the appearances of merit than merit itself.

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

Only the great can afford to have great defects.