Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
With monuments as with men, position means everything.
To have fame follow us is well, but it is not a desirable avant-courier.
No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea.
By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct.
Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.