“Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay.”

We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.

Some people displease with merit, and others’ very faults and defects are pleasing.

No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.

The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than others are saying.

We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised.

As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.

One forgives to the degree that one loves.

We have no patience with other people’s vanity because it is offensive to our own.

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

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.

There are very few things impossible in themselves; and we do not want means to conquer difficulties so much as application and resolution in the use of means.

Few things are impracticable in themselves; and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed.

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.

It is great folly to wish to be wise all alone.

If you wish to discover the guilty person, first find out to whom the crime might be useful.

May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.

I wish I was better looking.

Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness.

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

When we hold something, anything, in our thought, then somehow coincidence leads us in the direction that we’ve been wishing to lead ourselves.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

I saw them with my bodily eyes as clearly as I see you. And when they departed, I used to weep and wish they would take me with them.