Gloom and sadness are poison to us, and the origin of hysterics. You are right in thinking that this disease is in the imagination; you have defined it perfectly; it is vexation which causes it to spring up, and fear that supports it.
Long life will sometimes obscure the star of fame.
I do not like to employ secretaries that have more wit than myself. I am afraid to make them write all my nonsense.
We like so much to hear people talk of us and of our motives, that we are charmed even when they abuse us.
if I inflict wounds, I heal them.
I am persuaded that the greater part of our complaints arise from want of exercise.
The heart never becomes wrinkled.
Nothing is so capable of overturning a good intention as to show a distrust of it; to be suspected for an enemy, is often sufficient to make a person become one.
Friendships take work. Use disagreements as opportunity to come out better on the other side
[After being corrected by a grammarian for using the feminine pronoun instead of the pseudogeneric masculine:] As you please, but for my part, if I were to express myself so, I should fancy I had a beard.
Death makes us all equal.
Ah, what a grudge I owe physicians! what mummery is their art!
The heart has no wrinkles.
It is day by day that we go forward; today we are as we were yesterday and tomorrow we shall be like ourselves today. So we go on without being aware of it, and this is one of the miracles of Providence that I so love.
Racine will pass away like the taste for coffee.
There is no one who does not represent a danger to someone.
. . . this life is a perpetual chequer-work of good and evil, pleasure and pain. When in possession of what we desire, we are only so much the nearer losing it; and when at a distance from it, we live in expectation of enjoying it again.
The world has no long injustices.
We like no noise unless we make it ourselves.
. . .the most astonishing, the most surprising, the most marvelous, the most miraculous. . . the greatest, the least, the rarest, the most common, the most public, the most private till today. . . I cannot bring myself to tell you: guess what it is.
In all nations truth is the most sublime, the most simple, the most difficult, and yet the most natural thing.
It is freezing fit to split a stone.
When we reckon without Providence, we must frequently reckon twice.
