All quotes

Our forces begin to fail us; let us call them in and concentrate them in and for ourselves.

Fear is more importunate and insupportable than death itself

Whoever expects punishment already suffers it, and whoever has deserved it expects it.

a man should, at the first approaches, favour their grief and express some approbation of their sorrow

If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.

There is nothing to which nature seems so much to have inclined us, as to society

We sought one another long before we met, and by the characters we heard of one another

Whereas in friendship, 'tis a general and universal fire, but temperate and equal, a constant established heat, all gentle and smooth, without poignancy or roughness.

The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own.

Wherever the mind is perplexed, it is in an entire disorder, and domestic employments are not less troublesome for being less important.

A man should diffuse joy, but, as much as he can, smother grief.

Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one's ease: but men do not always take the right way.

Ambition is of all others the most contrary humour to solitude; glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place.

In our ordinary actions there is not one of a thousand that concerns ourselves.

Let us tell ambition that it is she herself who gives us a taste of solitude; for what does she so much avoid as society?

Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself.

There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man, the one by his vice, the other by his nature.

Your heart is wounded with compassion to hear the mourning of friends, and, perhaps with anger, to hear the counterfeit condolings of pretenders.