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

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them.

It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit.

If we resist our passions, it is more due to their weakness than our strength.

There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.

The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.

When we are in love we often doubt that which we most believe.

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

Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples.

Great souls are not those who have fewer passions and more virtues than others, but only those who have greater designs.

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

The only thing that should surprise us is that there are still some things that can surprise us.

All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.

In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.

We always love those who admire us, but we do not always love those whom we admire.

If we have not peace within ourselves, it is in vain to seek it from outward sources.

Divinity reveals herself in all things.

All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

There is no law governing all things.

I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?

I understand Being in all and over all, as there is nothing without participation in Being, and there is no being without Essence. Thus nothing can be free of the Divine Presence.

If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.

Time takes all and gives all