A man often thinks he rules himself, when all the while he is ruled and managed; and while his understanding directs one design, his affections imperceptibly draw him into another.
Men are often so foolish as to boast and value themselves upon their passions, even those that are most vicious. But envy is a passion so full of cowardice and shame that no one every ever had the confidence to own it.
Men never desire anything very eagerly which they desire only by the dictates of reason.
The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally tobe nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.
The passions do very often give birth to others of a nature most contrary to their own. Thus avarice sometimes brings forth prodigality, and prodigality avarice; a man’s resolution is very often the effect of levity, and his boldness that of cowardice and fear.
The same strength of character which helps a man resist love, helps to make it more violent and lasting too. People of unsettled minds are always driven about with passions, but never absolutely filled with any.
There is a sort of love whose very excessiveness prevents the lover’s being jealous.
Even the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which self-love always proposes to be the gainer one wayor another.
Unfaithfulness ought to extinguish love, and we should not be jealous when there is reason to be. Only those who give no grounds for jealousy are worthy of it.
A man is sometimes better off deceived about the one he loves, than undeceived.
Considering how little the beginning or the ceasing to love is in our own power, it is foolish and unreasonable for the lover or his mistress to complain of one another’s inconstancy.
Constancy in love is of two sorts: One is the effect of new excellencies that are always presenting themselves afresh, and attractour affections continually; the other is only from a point of honor, and a taking of pride not to change.
Jealousy is not so much the love of another as the love of ourselves.
Love has its name borrowed by a great number of dealings and affairs that are attributed to it – in which it has no greater part than the Doge in what is done at Venice.
Love is one and the same in the original; but there are a thousand different copies of it.
Lovers, when they are no longer in love, find it very hard to break up.
Some men are so full of themselves that when they fall in love, they amuse themselves rather with their own passion than with theperson they love.
Every one complains of a poor memory, no one of a weak judgment.
A man’s wits are better employed in bearing up under the misfortunes that lie upon him at present than in foreseeing those that may come upon him hereafter.
The health of the soul is something we can be no more sure of than that of the body; and though a man may seem far from the passions, yet he is in as much danger of falling into them as one in a perfect state of health of having a fit of sickness.