“A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.”

The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.

If we had no faults of our own, we should not take so much pleasure in noticing those in others.

When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.

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.

People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way.

For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.

She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.

I’m a person that carries everything that happened to me in my past, with me into the future. I refuse to let it make me bitter. I still completely believe in love and I remain open to anything that will happen to me.

I want to write happy poems on new years. But grief doesn’t have timelines, and it refuses to let go of me.

Every champion was once a contender that refused to give up.

I refuse to let what happened to me make me bitter.

He does not refuse sustenance to the one who speaks ill of Him. How then could He refuse sustenance to the one whose soul is over flowing with love for Him?