Wit sometimes enables us to act rudely with impunity.
A small degree of wit, accompanied by good sense, is less tiresome in the long run than a great amount of wit without it.
A good woman is a hidden treasure; who discovers her will do well not to boast about it.
Nothing is more ridiculous in old people that were once good-looking, than to forget that they are not so still.
Moral severity in women is only a dress or paint which they use to set off their beauty.
To think to be wise alone is a very great folly.
As we grow older, we increase in folly – and in wisdom.
There is an excess both in happiness and misery above our power of sensation.
Happiness does not consist in things themselves but in the relish we have of them; and a man has attained it when he enjoys what he loves and desires himself, and not what other people think lovely and desirable.
Men’s happiness and misery depends altogether as much upon their own humor as it does upon fortune.
What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner; and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.
If one judges love according to the greatest part of the effects it produces, it would appear to resemble rather hatred than kindness.
As long as we love, we can forgive.
Self-love makes our friends appear more or less deserving in proportion to the delight we take in them, and the measures by whichwe judge of their worth depend upon the manner of their conversing with us.
True friendship destroys envy, and true love destroys coquetterie.
The grace of novelty and the length of habit, though so very opposite to one another, yet agree in this, that they both alike keepus from discovering the faults of our friends.
When we enlarge upon the affection our friends have for us, this is very often not so much out of a sense of gratitude as from a desire to persuade people of our own great worth, that can deserve so much kindness.
The boldest stroke and best act of friendship is not to disclose our own failings to a friend, but to show him his own.
As uncommon a thing as true love is, it is yet easier to find than true friendship.
The love of new acquaintance comes not so much from being weary of what we had before, or from any satisfaction there is in change, as from the distaste we feel in being too little admired by those that know us too well, and the hope of being more admired by those that know us less.