Friendship is insipid to those who have experienced love.
The rust of business is sometimes polished off in a camp; but never in a court.
Passions often produce their contraries: avarice sometimes leads to prodigality, and prodigality to avarice; we are often obstinate through weakness and daring through timidity.
A well-trained mind has less difficulty in submitting to than in guiding an ill-trained mind.
Cunning and treachery proceed from want of capacity.
That conduct often seems ridiculous the secret reasons of which are wise and solid.
The clemency of Princes is often but policy to win the affections of the people.
We may say of agreeableness, as distinct from beauty, that it is a symmetry whose rules are unknown.
Of all the violent passions, the one that becomes a woman best is love.
A fool has not stuff enough to make a good man.
Passion very often makes the wisest men fools, and very often too inspires the greatest fools with wit.
What men call friendship is no more than a partnership, a mutual care of interests, an exchange of favors – in a word, it is a sort of traffic, in which self-love ever proposes to be the gainer.
We do not wish ardently for what we desire only through reason.
Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things themselves; we are happy from possessing what we like, not from possessing what others like.
There are more defects in temperament than in the mind.
There is a kind of love, the excess of which forbids jealousy.
As we grow older we grow both more foolish and wiser at the same time.
Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret.
Selfishness is the grand moving principle of nine-tenths of our actions.
The passions often engender their contraries.