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

If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.

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.

Perfect Valor is to do, without a witness, all that we could do before the whole world.

In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.

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

One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.

We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.

Taste may change, but inclination never.

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

On neither the sun, nor death, can a man look fixedly.

There is a kind of elevation which does not depend on fortune; it is a certain air which distinguishes us, and seems to destine us for great things; it is a price which we imperceptibly set upon ourselves.

It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.

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

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it.

One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines.

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

However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.

We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.

Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.

One forgives to the degree that one loves.

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.

Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.

The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.

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.

What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.

To know how to hide one's ability is great skill.

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

Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.

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

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.

The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.

Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.