Irresolute men are sometimes very persistent in their undertakings, because if they give up their designs they would have to make a second resolution.

Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.

Men do not so much hate an evil-doer, or evil itself, as they hate the man who calls evil by its real name.

The end of pain we take as happiness.

The old man, especially if he is in society in the privacy of his thoughts, though he may protest the opposite, never stops believing that, through some singular exception of the universal rule, he can in some unknown and inexplicable way still make an impression on women.

Nothing in the world is so rare as a person one can always put up with.

Man is almost always as wicked as his needs require.