Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.

Charity is a flower not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of profit.

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

Genius scorns the power of gold: it is wrong. Gold is the war-scythe on its chariot, which mows down the millions of its foes, and gives free passage to the sun-coursers with which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross battlefields of earth.

Emulation is active virtue; envy is brooding malice.

When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only - What a crib from Rochefoucauld!

Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities the world would be a bear-garden.