All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone.

Dissimulation, even the most innocent in its nature, is ever productive of embarrassment; whether the design is evil or not artifice is always dangerous and almost inevitably disgraceful.

The court is like a palace of marble; it's composed of people very hard and very polished.

The same common sense which makes an author write good things, makes him dread they are not good enough to deserve reading.

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.

At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.

Some young people do not sufficiently understand the advantages of natural charms, and how much they would gain by trusting to them entirely. They weaken these gifts of heaven, so rare and fragile, by affected manners and an awkward imitation. Their tones and their gait are borrowed; they study their attitudes before the glass until they have lost all trace of natural manner, and, with all their pains, they please but little.