“The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself.”

I might, by chance, write something just as shoddy; But then I wouldn’t show it to everybody.

The great ambition of women is to inspire love.

Cultivated people should be superior to any consideration so sordid as a mercenary interest.

Birth means nothing where there is no virtue.

I believe that two and two are four and that four and four are eight.

There is no protection against slander.

Too great haste leads us to error.

When we are understood, we always speak well, and then all your fine diction serves no purpose.

Rest assured that there is nothing which wounds the heart of a noble man more deeply than the thought his honour is assailed.

One cannot but mistrust a prospect of felicity: one must enjoy it before one can believe in it.

The more powerful the obstacle, the more glory we have in overcoming it; and the difficulties with which we are met are the maids of honor which set off virtue.

Oh, how fine it is to know a thing or two.

We live under a prince who is an enemy to fraud, a prince whose eyes penetrate into the heart, and whom all the art of impostors can’t deceive.

The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.

I maintain, in truth, That with a smile we should instruct our youth, Be very gentle when we have to blame, And not put them in fear of virtue’s name.

Men often marry in hasty recklessness and repent afterward all their lives.