There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

Life at court does not satisfy a man, but it keeps him from being satisfied with anything else.

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

Favor exalts a man above his equals, but his dismissal from that favor places him below them.

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

To forget someone means to think of him.

We are more sociable, and get on better with people by the heart than the intellect.