Cheats easily believe others as bad as themselves; there is no deceiving them, nor do they long deceive.

We wish to constitute all the happiness, or, if that cannot be, the misery of the one we love.

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.

We hope to grow old and we dread old age; that is to say, we love life and we flee from death.

It is very rare to find ground which produces nothing; if it is not covered with flowers, with fruit trees and grains, it produces briers and pines. It is the same with man; if he is not virtuous, he becomes vicious.

Eloquence is to the sublime what the whole is to the part.

False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.