The contempt of riches in the philosophers was a concealed desire of revenging on fortune the injustice done to their merit, by despising the good she denied them.
Moderation cannot have the credit of combatiug and subduing ambition, they are never found together. Moderation is the languor and indolence of the soul, as ambition is its activity and ardor.
Good and bad fortune are found severally to visit those who have the most of the one or the other.
Our probity is not less at the mercy of fortune than our property.
The good or the bad fortune of men depends not less upon their own dispositions than upon fortune.
Self-love increases or diminishes for us the good qualities of our friends, in proportion to the satisfaction we feel with them; and we judge of their merit by the manner in which they act towards us.
The generality of friends puts us out of conceit with friendship; just as the generality of religious people puts us out of conceit with religion.
Friendship is a traffic wherein self-love always proposes to be the gainer.
We love everything on our own account; we even follow our own taste and inclination when we prefer our friends to ourselves; and yet it is this preference alone that constitutes true and perfect friendship.
Those whom the world has delighted to honor have oftener been influenced in their doings by ambition and vanity than by patriotism.
All who know their own minds know not their own hearts.
One honor won is a surety for more.
There are several remedies which will cure love, but there are no infallible ones.
In misfortune we often mistake dejection for constancy; we bear it without daring to look on it; like cowards, who suffer themselves to be murdered without resistance.
Pity is a sense of our own misfortunes in those of another man; it is a sort of foresight of the disasters which may befall ourselves. We assist others,, in order that they may assist us on like occasions; so that the services we offer to the unfortunate are in reality so many anticipated kindnesses to ourselves.
Prudence and love are inconsistent; in proportion as the last increases, the other decreases.
There is no praise we have not lavished upon prudence; and yet she cannot assure to us the most trifling event.
Nothing is so capable of diminishing self-love as the observation that we disapprove at one time what we approve at another.
Self-love, as it happens to be well or ill conducted, constitutes virtue and vice.
It is with sincere affection or friendship as with ghosts and apparitions,--a thing that everybody talks of, and scarce any hath seen.
Kings do with men as with pieces of money; they give them what value they please, and we are obliged to receive them at their current and not at their real value.
It may be said that the vices await us in the journey of life like hosts with whom we must successively lodge; and I doubt whether experience would make us avoid them if we were to travel the same road a second time.
The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.
What often prevents our abandoning ourselves to a single vice is, our having more than one.
The vivacity that augments with years is not far from folly.
