“Temperament is the thermometer of character.”

In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.

Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.

To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.

How can we explain the perpetuity of envy–a vice which yields no return?

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!

The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.

People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.

As a rule, only the poor are generous.

Everybody all over the world takes a wife’s estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.

When I am right, I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. We are angry at each other much of the time.

A woman gets angry when a man denies his faults, because she knew them all along. His lying mocks her affection; it is the deceit that angers her more than the faults.

The way the people around you position themselves around you to get in your pockets and in your mind is infuriating to me.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

The finest fury is the most controlled.

If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life – you won’t enjoy any of it.

Many of us have read about and talked about forgiveness, and we understand intellectually why it might benefit us to let go of anger toward others. But we hold on anyway.

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.