Heat of blood makes young people change their inclinations often, and habit makes old ones keep to theirs a great while.
In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.
The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.
Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.
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.
In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.
Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.
Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.
What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.
In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.
Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.
True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.
There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.
There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.
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 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.
Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.
It is with true love as it is with ghosts everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.
In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.
We always love those who admire us, but we do not always love those whom we admire.
We are nearer loving those who hate us than those who love us more than we wish.
We may sooner be brought to love them that hate us, than them that love us more than we would have them do.
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.
Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.
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.
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.
A great many men's gratitude is nothing but a secret desire to hook in more valuable kindnesses hereafter.
Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.
There is no better proof of a man's being truly good than his desiring to be constantly under the observation of good men.
The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.
Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.
There are but very few men clever enough to know all the mischief they do.
Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples.
Few things are impracticable in themselves and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed.
There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.
Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.
Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.