Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.

But woman brings disorder into society through passion.

I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me . . . to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing.

Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.

One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.

The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes.

One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.