Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.
The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.
We cannot work for others without working for ourselves.
All kinds of frankness and honesty are terrible crimes in the eyes of society.
Girls must be thwarted early in life.
One can buy anything with money except morality.
The taste for splendor is hardly ever combined in the same souls with the taste for the honorable.
It is not possible for minds degraded by a host of trivial concerns to ever rise to anything great.
If, by chance, someone among those men of extraordinary talent is found who has firmness of soul and who refuses to yield to the genius of his age and to debase himself with childish works, woe unto him! He will die in poverty and oblivion.
The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.
Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.
One loses all the time which he might employ to better purpose.
One must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time.
The tone of good conversation is brilliant and natural; it is neither tedious nor frivolous; it is instructive without pedantry, gay without tumultuousness, polished without affectation, gallant without insipidity, waggish without equivocation.
All that time is lost which might be better employed.
If all were perfect Christians, individuals would do their duty; the people would be obedient to the laws, the magistrates incorrupt, and there would be neither vanity nor luxury in such a state.
The opportunity of making happy is more scarce than we imagine; the punishment of missing it is, never to meet with it again; and the use we make of it leaves us an eternal sentiment of satisfaction or repentance.
Generally we obtain very surely and very speedily what we are not too anxious to obtain.
Abstaining so as really to enjoy, is the epicurism, the very perfection, of reason.
He who blushes is already guilty.