“Perfect valour consists in doing without witnesses that which we would be capable of doing before everyone.”

Weakness of character is the only defect which cannot be amended.

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

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.

When a man is in love, he doubts, very often, what he most firmly believes.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can’t quite name.

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

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.

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

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

Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.

Conceit causes more conversation than wit.

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.

I never met anyone who didn’t have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

I can take more punishment than anyone in the business.

Never give anyone the advice to buy or sell shares, because the most benevolent price of advice can turn out badly.

However greatly we distrust the sincerity of those we converse with, yet still we think they tell more truth to us than to anyone else.

How can we expect another to keep our secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves?

Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.

Bohr’s influence on the physics and the physicists of our century was stronger than that of anyone else, even than that of Albert Einstein.

I’m just trying to be myself. I’m not trying to be anyone else.