We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.

Hatred is keener than friendship, less keen than love.

We can love with all our hearts those in whom we recognize great faults. It would be impertinent to believe that perfection alone has the right to please us; sometimes our weaknesses attach us to each other as much as our virtues.

The generality of men are so bound within the sphere of their circumstances that they have not even the courage to get out of them through their ideas, and if we see a few whom, in a way, speculation over great things makes incapable of mean ones, we find still more with whom the practice of small things takes away the feeling for great ones.

You are not born for fame if you don't know the value of time.

Servitude degrades people to such a point that they come to like it.

The mind is the soul's eye, not its source of power. That lies in the heart, in other words, in the passions.