The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.

Widows, like ripe fruit, drop easily from their perch.

There are few wives so perfect as not to give their husbands at least once a day good reason to repent of ever having married, or at least of envying those who are unmarried.

We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our embarrassment when alone together.

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.

It is in vain to ridicule a rich fool, for the laughers will be on his side.

High birth is a gift of fortune which should never challenge esteem towards those who receive it, since it costs them neither study nor labor.