Action makes more fortune than caution.

We must expect everything and fear everything from time and from men.

There does not exist a man sufficiently intelligent never to be tiresome.

Whatever affection we have for our friends or relations, the happiness of others never suffices for our own.

All that causes one man to differ from another is a very slight thing. What is it that is the origin of beauty or ugliness, health or weakness, ability or stupidity? A slight difference in the organs, a little more or a little less bile. Yet this more or less is of infinite importance to men; and when they think otherwise they are mistaken.

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.

Few people are modest enough to be estimated at their true worth.