One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.

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.

To what excesses do men rush for the sake of religion, of whose truth they are so little persuaded, and to whose precepts they pay so little regard!

The great charm of conversation consists less in the display of one's own wit and intelligence than in the power to draw forth the resources of others.

Misers are neither relations, nor friends, nor citizens, nor Christians, nor perhaps even human beings.

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

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