 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. |
| We pardon to the extent that we love. |
| The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices. |
| The force we use on ourselves, to prevent ourselves from loving, is often more cruel than the severest treatment at the hands of one loved. |
| Only the contemptible fear contempt. |
| We may seem great in an employment below our worth, but we very often look little in one that is too big for us. |
| What we call generosity is for the most part only the vanity of giving; and we exercise it because we are more fond of that vanity than of the thing we give. |
| We easily forgive our friends those faults that do no affect us ourselves. |
| Few things are impracticable in themselves; and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed. |
| We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them. |
| There are few virtuous women who are not bored with their trade. |
| Our aversion to lying is commonly a secret ambition to make what we say considerable, and have every word received with a religious respect. |
| There is many a virtuous woman weary of her trade. |
| No men are oftener wrong than those that can least bear to be so. |
| In the human heart new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another. |
| All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones. |
| A man is sometimes as different from himself as he is from others. |
| Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. |
| Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead. |
| Nothing prevents one from appearing natural as the desire to appear natural. |
