There are several remedies which will cure love, but there are no infallible ones.
Many young persons believe themselves natural when they are only impolite and coarse.
In misfortune we often mistake dejection for constancy; we bear it without daring to look on it; like cowards, who suffer themselves to be murdered without resistance.
Prudence and love are inconsistent; in proportion as the last increases, the other decreases.
There is no praise we have not lavished upon prudence; and yet she cannot assure to us the most trifling event.
Self-love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.
Self-love, as it happens to be well or ill conducted, constitutes virtue and vice.
Whatever discoveries we may have made in the regions of self-love, there still remain many unknown lands.
It is with sincere affection or friendship as with ghosts and apparitions, – a thing that everybody talks of, and scarce any hath seen.
The health of the soul is as precarious as that of the body; for when we seem secure from passions, we are no less in danger of their infection than we are of falling ill when we appear to be well.
We acknowledge that we should not talk of our wives; but we seem not to know that we should talk still less of ourselves.
Good taste comes more from the judgment than from the mind.
Men more easily renounce their interests than their tastes.
Kings do with men as with pieces of money; they give them what value they please, and we are obliged to receive them at their current and not at their real value.
The less you trust others, the less you will be deceived.
It may be said that the vices await us in the journey of life like hosts with whom we must successively lodge; and I doubt whether experience would make us avoid them if we were to travel the same road a second time.
What often prevents our abandoning ourselves to a single vice is, our having more than one.
The vivacity that augments with years is not far from folly.
We should wish for few things with eagerness, if we perfectly knew the nature of that which was the object of our desire.
The most brilliant fortunes are often not worth the littleness required to gain them.