There is no curing a sick man who believes himself to be in health.

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.

If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.

Learn to... be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.