Children are contemptuous, haughty, irritable, envious, sneaky, selfish, lazy, flighty, timid, liars and hypocrites, quick to laugh and cry, extreme in expressing joy and sorrow, especially about trifles, they'll do anything to avoid pain but they enjoy inflicting it: little men already.

There is not in the world so toilsome a trade as the pursuit of fame; life concludes before you have so much as sketched your work.

We all covet wealth, but not its perils.

The very impossibility which I find to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

Politeness does not always inspire goodness, equity, complaisance, and gratitude; it gives at least the appearance of these qualities, and makes man appear outwardly, as he should be within.

False modesty is the masterpiece of vanity: showing the vain man in such an illusory light that he appears in the reputation of the virtue quite opposite to the vice which constitutes his real character; it is a deceit.

A well-born man is fortunate, but so is the man about whom people no longer ask, 'is he well-born?'