You may depend upon it that he is a good man whose intimate friends are all good, and whose enemies are decidedly bad.

The less you can enjoy, the poorer, the scantier yourself - the more you can enjoy, the richer, the more vigorous.

What knowledge is there of which man is capable that is not founded on the exterior,--the relation that exists between visible and invisible, the perceptible and the imperceptible?

His calumny is not only the greatest benefit a rogue can confer on us, but the only service he will perform for nothing.

Airs of importance are the credentials of impotence.

Trust him not with your secrets, who, when left alone in your room, turns over your papers.

Avoid connecting yourself with characters whose good and bad sides are unmixed and have not fermented together; they resemble vials of vinegar and oil; or palletts set with colors; they are either excellent at home and insufferable abroad, or intolerable within doors and excellent in public; they are unfit for friendship, merely because their stamina, their ingredients of character are too single, too much apart; let them be finely ground up with each other, and they are incomparable.