The pleasures of the world are deceitful; they promise more than they give! They trouble us in seeking them, they do not satisfy us when possessing them and they make us despair in losing them..
With great employments and vulgar maxims, one is always restless and uneasy: it is not places, but reason, that removes anxiety from the mind.
One of the duties of old-age, is the management of time. The less that remains to us, the more valuable we ought to consider it.
It is not always our faults that ruin us, but the manner of our conduct after we have committed them.
Shame is a secret pride; and pride is an error with regard to one’s own worth, and an injustice with regard to what one has a mind to appear to others.
We live with our inherent defects as we do with the perfumes that we wear, we do not smell them; they only incommode others.
A man that does not aim at raising to himself a great name, will never perform any great actions. And such as go carelessly on in the road of their piofessions suffer all the fatigues, without acquiring either the honour or recompense that naturally attend it.
The most necessary disposition to relish pleasures is to know how to be without them.
We are not indeed obliged always to speak what we think, but we must always think what we speak.
The world steals us from ourselves and solitude restores us. The world is composed of a herd, which are ever flying from themselves.
Birth bestows less of honour than it demands; and to boast of ancestry is but to praise the merit of others.