The most exacting jailer is our own conscience.
The great chastisement of a knave is not to be known, but to know himself.
Conscience serves us especially to judge of the actions of others.
Without big words, how could many people say small things?
We forget the origin of a parvenu if he remembers it; we remember it if he forgets it.
Adversity, which makes us indulgent to others, renders them severe towards us.
Those virtues which cost us dear prove that we love God; those which are easy to us prove that He loves us.
When our friends are alive, we see the good qualities they lack; dead, we remember only those they possessed.
We find ourselves less witty in remembering what we have said than in dreaming of what we would have said.
Of all trifles, titles are the lightest.
Our interests are grains of opium to our consciences, but they only put it to sleep for a terrible awakening.
A pedant holds more to instruct us with what he knows, than of what we are ignorant.
What we gain by experience is not worth that we lose in illusion.
The true worth of a soul is revealed as much by the motive it attributes to the actions of others as by its own deeds.
Every generous illusion of youth leaves a wrinkle as it departs. Experience is the successive disenchanting of the things of life; it is reason enriched with the heart’s spoils.
We are told to walk noiselessly through the world, that we may waken neither hatred, nor envy; but, alas! what can we do when they never sleep!
It is only before those who are glad to hear it, and anxious to spread it, that we find it easy to speak ill of others.
Genius, like a torch, shines less in the broad daylight of the present than in the night of the past.
Another life, if it were not better than this, would be less a promise than a threat.
The weak-minded man is the slave of his vices and the dupe of his virtues.