It is impossible to be just if one is not generous.

There is a slowness in affairs which ripens them, and a slowness which rots them.

Friendship is the ideal; friends are the reality; reality always remains far apart from the ideal.

The chief cause of our misery is less the violence of our passions than the feebleness of our virtues.

The man abandoned by his friends, one after another, without just cause, will acquire, the reputation of being hard to please, changeable, ungrateful, unsociable.

The philosopher spends in becoming a man the time which the ambitious man spends in becoming a personage.

Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.