"Confidence contributes more to conversation than wit."

"We get so much in the habit of wearing disguises before others that we finally appear disguised before ourselves."

"The heart is forever making the head its fool."

"No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does."

"We are more often treacherous, through weakness than through calculation."

"A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter."

"A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others."

"A man's worth has its season, like fruit."

"Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires."

"As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing."

"Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it."

"Being a blockhead is sometimes the best security against being cheated by a man of wit."

"Every one speaks well of his own heart, but no one dares speak well of his own mind."

"Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them."

"Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency."

"Fortune converts everything to the advantage of her favorites."

"Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example."

"Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors."

"He is not to pass for a man of reason who stumbles upon reason by chance but he who knows it and can judge it and has a true taste for it."

"Heat of blood makes young people change their inclinations often, and habit makes old ones keep to theirs a great while."

"Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route."

"How can we expect another to keep our secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves?"

"How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?"

"However glorious an action in itself, it ought not to pass for great if it be not the effect of wisdom and intention."

"However greatly we distrust the sincerity of those we converse with, yet still we think they tell more truth to us than to anyone else."

"Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue."

"If there be a love pure and free from the admixture of our other passions, it is that which lies hidden in the bottom of our heart, and which we know not ourselves."

"If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could never harm us."

"If we had no faults of our own, we should not take half so much satisfaction in observing those of other people."

"If we judge love by most of its effects, it resembles rather hatred than affection."

"If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than our strength."

"In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge."

"In love we often doubt what we most believe."

"It is a great act of cleverness to be able to conceal one's being clever."

"It is almost always a fault of one who loves not to realize when he ceases to be loved."

"It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves."

"It is from a weakness and smallness of mind that men are opinionated; and we are very loath to believe what we are not able to comprehend."

"It is not enough to have great qualities; We should also have the management of them."

"It is not in the power of even the most crafty dissimulation to conceal love long, where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not."

"It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit."

"It is with an old love as it is with old age a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures."

"It takes nearly as much ability to know how to profit by good advice as to know how to act for one's self."

"Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness."

"Jealousy is not so much the love of another as the love of ourselves."

"Jealousy springs more from love of self than from love of another."

"Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can; and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being."

"Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love."

"Many men are contemptuous of riches; few can give them away."

"Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding."

"Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love."