If you wish particularly to gain the good graces and affection of certain people, men or women, try to discover their most striking merit, if they have one, and their dominant weakness, for every one has his own, then do justice to the one, and a little more than justice to the other.

Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are.

Cardinal Mazarin was a great knave, but no great man; much more cunning than able; scandalously false and dirtily greedy.

The possibility of remedying imprudent actions is commonly an inducement to commit them.

There is nothing that people bear more impatiently, or forgive less, than contempt: and an injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.

History is but a confused heap of facts.

Ugliness is a letter of credit for some special purposes.