As we grow older, we increase in folly--and in wisdom.
Our wisdom lies as much at the mercy of fortune as our possessions do.
There is an excess both in happiness and misery above our power of sensation.
Happiness does not consist in things themselves but in the relish we have of them; and a man has attained it when he enjoys what he loves and desires himself, and not what other people think lovely and desirable.
What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner; and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.
If one judges love according to the greatest part of the effects it produces, it would appear to resemble rather hatred than kindness.
As long as we love, we can forgive.
Men never desire anything very eagerly which they desire only by the dictates of reason.
The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally tobe nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.
The passions do very often give birth to others of a nature most contrary to their own. Thus avarice sometimes brings forth prodigality, and prodigality avarice; a man's resolution is very often the effect of levity, and his boldness that of cowardice and fear.
The same strength of character which helps a man resist love, helps to make it more violent and lasting too. People of unsettled minds are always driven about with passions, but never absolutely filled with any.
There is a sort of love whose very excessiveness prevents the lover's being jealous.
Even the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which self-love always proposes to be the gainer one wayor another.
Unfaithfulness ought to extinguish love, and we should not be jealous when there is reason to be. Only those who give no grounds for jealousy are worthy of it.
A man is sometimes better off deceived about the one he loves, than undeceived.
Considering how little the beginning or the ceasing to love is in our own power, it is foolish and unreasonable for the lover or his mistress to complain of one another's inconstancy.
It is easier to fall in love when you are out of it than to get out of it when you are in.
We are never so generous as when giving advice.
Virtue is to the soul what health is tot he body.
It is not always for virtue's sake that women are virtuous.
In friendship, as in love, we are often more happy from the things we are ignorant of than from those we are acquainted with.
A man may be sharper than another, but not than all others.
A woman often thinks she regrets the lover, when she only regrets the love.
Absence abates a moderate passion and intensifies a great one - as the wind blows out a candle but fans fire into flame.
Consolation for unhappiness can often be found in a certain satisfaction we get from looking unhappy.
