Too great haste to repay an obligation is a kind of ingratitude.
We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of others.
We are easily comforted for the misfortunes of our friends, when those misfortunes give us an occasion of expressing our affection and solicitude.
We are nearer loving those who hate us than those who love us more than we wish.
We do not praise others, ordinarily, but in order to be praised ourselves.
We easily forgive our friends those faults that do no affect us ourselves.
We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.
Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.
Women’s virtue is frequently nothing but a regard to their own quiet and a tenderness for their reputation.
Our concern for the loss of our friends is not always from a sense of their worth, but rather of our own need of them and that we have lost some who had a good opinion of us.
A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.
Nature seems at each man’s birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.
If there be a love pure and free from the admixture of our other passions, it is that which lies hidden in the bottom of our heart, and which we know not ourselves.
Our actions seem to have their lucky and unlucky stars, to which a great part of that blame and that commendation is due which is given to the actions themselves.
Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can; and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being.
In all professions each affects a look and an exterior to appear what he wishes the world to believe that he is. Thus we may say that the whole world is made up of appearances.
Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.
Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves.
Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary by sense.