We can love nothing but what agrees with us, and we can only follow our taste or our pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; nevertheless it is only by that preference that friendship can be true and perfect. |
We can never be certain of our courage until we have faced danger. |
We come fresh to the different stages of life, and in each of them we are quite inexperienced, no matter how old we are |
We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones. |
We credit scarcely any persons with good sense except those who are of our opinion |
We daily share emotions, our personal and shared needs and hope. |
We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue. |
We do not like to praise, and we never praise without a motive. Praise is flattery, artful, hidden, delicate, which gratifies differently him who praises and him who is praised. The one takes it as the reward of merit, the other bestows it to show his imp |
We do not usually reckon a woman's first flirtation until she has had a second. |
We do not wish to lose life; we do wish to gain glory, and this makes brave men show more tact and address in avoiding death, than rogues show in preserving their fortunes. |
We easily forget crimes that are known only to ourselves |
We easily forgive in our friends those faults we do not perceive. |
We exaggerate the glory of some men to detract from that of others, and we should praise Prince Condé and Marshal Turenne much less if we did not want to blame them both. |
We forget our faults easily when they are known to ourselves alone. |
We frequently do good to enable us with impunity to do evil. |