How much wit, good-nature, indulgences, how many good offices and civilities, are required among friends to accomplish in some years what a lovely face or a fine hand does in a minute!

It would be a kind of ferocity to reject indifferently all sorts of praise. One should be glad to have that which comes from good men who praise in sincerity things that are really praiseworthy.

Love and friendship exclude each other.

A man is thirty years old before he has any settled thoughts of his fortune; it is not completed before fifty. He falls to building in his old age, and dies by the time his house is in a condition to be painted and glazed.

A well-born man is fortunate, but so is the man about whom people no longer ask, 'is he well-born?'

Two persons cannot long be friends if they cannot forgive each other's little failings.

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