We should laugh before being happy, for fear of dying without having laughed.

Days, months, years fly away, and irrecoverably sink in the abyss of time.

I do not doubt but that genuine piety is the spring of peace of mind; it enables us to bear the sorrows of life, and lessens the pangs of death: the same cannot be said of hypocrisy.

Piety with some people, but especially with women, is either a passion, or an infirmity of age, or a fashion which must be followed.

It is through madness that we hate an enemy, and think of revenging ourselves; and it is through indolence that we are appeased, and do not revenge ourselves.

They who, without any previous knowledge of us, think amiss of us, do us no harm; they attack not us, but the phantom of their own imagination.

Between good sense and good taste there lies the difference between a cause and its effect.