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.

Modesty is silent when it would be improper to speak; the humble, without being called upon, never recollects to say anything of himself.

The more any one speaks of himself, the less he likes to hear another talked of.

Desire is the uneasiness a man finds in himself upon the absence of anything whose present enjoyment carries the idea of delight with it.

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?

There are no friends more inseparable than pride and hardness of heart, humility and love, falsehood and impudence.

The worst of faces still is human.