“Truly generous men are always ready to become sympathetic when their enemy’s misfortune surpasses the limits of their hatred.”

If it is ones lot to be cast among fools, one must learn foolishness.

To save a man and thereby to spare a father’s agony and a mother’s feelings is not to do a noble deed, it is but an act of humanity.

The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.

All for one, one for all, that is our device.

Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? – why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections – an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places – which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place.

Life is a storm. One minute you will bathe under the sun and the next you will be shattered upon the rocks. That’s when you shout, “Do your worst, for I will do mine!” and you will be remembered forever.

Youth is a blossom whose fruit is love; happy is he who plucks it after watching it slowly ripen.

To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.

It is only the dead who do not return.

Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.

Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.

In love, writing is dangerous, not to mention pointless.

Tell the angel who will watch over your life to pray now and then for a man who, like Satan, believed himself for an instant to be equal to God, but who realized in all humility that supreme power and wisdom are in the hands of God alone.

Here is your final lesson – do not commit the crime for which you now serve the sentence. God said, “Vengeance is mine.” […] He believes in you.

So much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have some bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts.

You who are in power have only the means that money produces – we who are in expectation, have those which devotion prompts.

The result showed that fortune helps the brave.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate … can look fortune in the face.

No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.

One’s virtue is all that one truly has, because it is not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune.

All fortune is good fortune; for it either rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes, and so is either useful or just.

He is truly a man who will not permit himself to be unduly elated when fortune’s breeze is favorable, or cast down when it is adverse.

It is when fortune is the most propitious that she is least to be trusted.