Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can´t quite name.

We come altogether fresh and raw into the
several stages of life, and often find ourselves
without experience despite our years.

We are nearer loving those who hate us
than those who love us more than we wish.

When we are unable to find tranquility within
ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

Those who have had great passions esteem
themselves for the rest of their lives fortunate,
and unfortunate in being cured of them

Too great haste to repay an obligation is a kind
of ingratitude.

The generality of virtuous women are like hidden
treasures, they are safe only because nobody
has saught after them.

The mind is always the patsy of the heart.

The reason that lovers never weary each other
is because they are always talking about
themselves.

Love can no more continue without a constant
motion that fire can; and when you take hope
and fear away, you take from it its very
life and being.

If we judge love by most of its effects, it
resembles rather hatred than affection.

Quorrels would not last long if the fault was
only on one sida.

Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to
lead us to the end of our lives by an
agreeable route.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and
increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes
candles and fans fires.

One forgives to the degree that one loves.

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings,
and that which we take the least care of all
to acquire.

There is no diguise which can hide love for long
where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.

The man that thinks he loves his mistress
for her own sake is mightily mistaken.

True love is like ghosts which everyone talks
about and few have seen.

Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom
does one return from ambition to love.

In the human heart new passions are forever
being born; the overthrow of one almost
always means the rise of another.

The principal point of cleverness is to know
how to value things just as they deserve.

Solemnity is a device of the body to hide
the faults of the mind.

We confess our little faults to persuade
people that we have no large ones.

We should often be ashamed of our finest
actions if the world understood our motives.

It is a great ability to be able to conceal
one´s ability.

We all have strength enough to endure
the misfortunes of others.

Silence is the safest course for any man
to adopt who distrust himself.

Being a blockhead is sometimes the best
security against being cheated by a man
of wit.

Everybody complains of his memory,
and nobody complains of his judgement.

Flattery is kind of bad money to which
our vanity gives us currency.

We are more often treacherous through
weakness than through calculation.

We are so used to dissembling with others
that in time we come to deceive and
dissemble with ourselves.

We are never so ridiculous through what
we are as through what we pretend to be.

The sure mark of one born with noble
qualities is being born without envy.

Innocence does not find near so much
protection as guilt.

Most of our faults are more pardonable than
the means we use to conceal them.

Before we set our hearts too much upon
anything, let us examine how happy they
are, who already possess it.

It is easier to be wise for others than
for ourselves.

Nothing is so contagious as example and we
never do any great good or evil which does
not produce its like.

As one grows older one becomes wiser
and more foolish.

To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently
is an art.

The sort of liveliness which increases with
age is not far distant from madness.

If we had no faults of our own, we would
not take so much pleasure in noticing those
of others.

I have always been a admirer. I regard the
gift of admiration as indispensable if one is
to amount to something; I do not know
where I would be without it.

It is with an old love as it is with an old age;
a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead
to all the pleasures.