The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.

The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.

A man who does not endeavour to seem more than he is will generally be thought nothing of. We habitually make such large deductions for pretence and imposture that no real merit will stand against them. It is necessary to set off our good qualities with a certain air of plausibility and self-importance, as some attention to fashion is necessary.

It is better to drink of deep grief than to taste shallow pleasures.

Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.

In what we really understand, we reason but little.