Laws are always useful to those who possess and vexatious to those who have nothing.

Even knaves may be made good for something.

The tone of good conversation is brilliant and natural; it is neither tedious nor frivolous; it is instructive without pedantry, gay without tumultuousness, polished without affectation, gallant without insipidity, waggish without equivocation.

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

An intelligent being, is the active principle of all things. One must have renounced all common sense to doubt it, and it is a waste of time to try to prove such self evident truth.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

I bold it impossible, that the great monarchies of Europe can subsist much longer; they all affect magnificence and splendor.