Friendship can exist between persons of different sexes, without any coarse or sensual feelings; yet a woman always looks upon a man as a man, and so a man will look upon a woman as a woman.
I am not astonished that men who lean, as it were, on an atom, should stumble at the smallest efforts they make for discovering the truth ; that, being so short-sighted, they do not reach beyond the heavens and the stars, to contemplate God Himself.
To speak and to offend is with some people but one and the same thing.
To express truth is to write naturally, forcibly, and delicately.
When a plain-looking woman is loved, it is certain to be very passionately ; for either her influence on her lover is irresistible, or she has some secret and more irresistible charms than those of beauty.
It is no more in our power to love always than it was not to love at all.
The finest and most beautiful ideas on morals and manners have been swept away before our times, and nothing is left for us but to glean after the ancients and the ablest amongst the moderns.
A man of variable mind is not one man, but several men in one; he multiplies himself as often as he changes his taste and manners; he is not this minute what he was the last, and will not be the next what he is now; he is his own successor.
What the people call eloquence is the facility some persons have of speaking alone and for a long time, aided by extravagant gestures, a loud voice, and powerful lungs.
We never love with all our heart and all our soul but once, and that is the first time.
He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.
All the worth of some people lies in their name; upon a closer inspection it dwindles to nothing, but from a distance it deceives us.
Women are at little trouble to express what they do not feel; but men are still at less to express what they do feel.
Great things astonish us, and small dishearten us. Custom makes both familiar.
Caprice in women often infringes upon the rules of decency.
Dissimulation, even the most innocent in its nature, is ever productive of embarrassment; whether the design is evil or not artifice is always dangerous and almost inevitably disgraceful.
A prince wants only the pleasure of private life to complete his happiness.
Duty is what goes most against the grain, because in doing that we do only what we are strictly obliged to, and are seldom much praised for it.
The pleasure a man of honor enjoys in the consciousness of having performed his duty is a reward he pays himself for all his pains.
An egotist will always speak of himself, either in praise or in censure, but a modest man ever shuns making himself the subject of his conversation.