National literature begins with fables and ends with novels.
I love prudence very little, if it is not moral.
We use up in the passions the stuff that was given us for happiness.
We should always keep a corner of our heads open and free, that we may make room for the opinions of our friends. Let us have heart and head hospitality.
We measure minds by their stature; it would be better to esteem them by their beauty.
We disjoint the mind like the body.
Minds which never rest are subject to many digressions.
The punishment of those who have loved women too much is to love them always.
The early and the latter part of human life are the best, or, at least, the most worthy of respect; the one as the age of innocence, the other of reason.
Religion must be loved as a kind of country and nursing-mother. It was religion that nourished our virtues, that showed us heaven, that taught us to walk in the path of duty.
Genuinely good remarks surprise their author as well as his audience...
How many people eat, drink, and get married; buy, sell, and build; make contracts and attend to their fortune; have friends and enemies, pleasures and pains, are born, grow up, live and die – but asleep!
Happy is the man who can do only one thing; in doing it, he fulfills his destiny.
We do not do well except when we know where the best is and when we are assured that we have touched it and hold its power within us.
Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.
Our worries always come from our weaknesses.
Our ideals, like pictures, are made from lights and shadows.
Tenderness is the rest of passion.
It is an aspect of all happiness to suppose that we deserve it.
In temperance there is ever cleanliness and elegance.