Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, although they come and go by day, are like the smith's bellows: they take breath but are not alive.

Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.

The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.

It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.

To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.

A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof. The throwing out [of] malicious imputations against any character leaves a stain, which no after-refutation can wipe out. To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said. The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.

Actors are the only honest hypocrites.