We like to read others but we do not like to be read.
The most violent passions sometimes leave us at rest, but vanity agitates us constantly.
Vices are ingredients of virtues just as poisons are ingredients of remedies. Prudence mixes and tempers them and uses them effectively against life’s ills.
Often we are firm from weakness, and audacious from timidity.
The greatest fault of a penetrating wit is to go beyond the mark.
There is scarcely any man sufficiently clever to appreciate all the evil he does.
All the passions are nothing else than different degrees of heat and cold of the blood.
However evil men may be they dare not be openly hostile to virtue, and so when they want to attack it they pretend to find it spurious, or impute crimes to it.
He is not to pass for a man of reason who stumbles upon reason by chance but he who knows it and can judge it and has a true taste for it.
Many men are contemptuous of riches; few can give them away.
Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.
Coquetry is the essential characteristic, and the prevalent humor of women; but they do not all practice it, because the coquetry of some is restrained by fear or by reason.
We should scarcely desire things ardently if we were perfectly acquainted with what we desire.
The violence we do to ourselves in order to remain faithful to the one we love is hardly better than an act of infidelity.
No fools are so difficult to manage as those with some brains.
In every walk of life each man puts on a personality and outward appearance so as to look what he wants to be thought; in fact you might say that society is entirely made up of assumed personalities.
The sicknesses of the soul have their ups and downs like those of the body; what we take to be a cure is most often merely a respite or change of disease.
Strength and weakness of mind are misnomers; they are really nothing but the good or bad health of our bodily organs.
Spiritual health is no more stable than bodily; and though we may seem unaffected by the passions we are just as liable to be carried away by them as to fall ill when in good health.
Sobriety is concern for one’s health – or limited capacity.