The art of pleasing is the ability to deceive.
However interested you may be in politics, you are unlikely to find more boring and tiresome reading than a treaty concluded between sovereigns.
How of little use is the best advice, if your own experience so seldom teaches you!
He who is able to endure all things, to him it is given to be bold in all things.
Any passion that dominates man opens a direct way of access to it.
Love is stronger than ambition: you can love a woman even when she hates you.
People like even those praises in the seriousness of which they themselves do not believe.
Many bold ideas were not translated into life because of their too timid realization.
The thought of death is treacherous: being captivated by this thought, we forget to live.
Hope is the most useful and the most harmful of all the blessings of life.
It is impossible to have no positive quality, just as it is impossible to have no defect.
Unanimously accepted views should not be ridiculed - this irritates and in no way discourages the defenders of these views.
To have a quick mind is a small advantage, if your judgment is not fair: the perfecting of watches consists not in going fast, but in going right.
The hatred of the weak is less dangerous than their friendship.
There is no offense that we would not forgive by avenging it.
There is no man who, reading a work in prose, does not think: "I will try to write it better."
Novelty is the only indisputable sign of genius.
Manners break more easily than they heal.
Images adorn the mind, feeling convinces it.
In venturing into something grand, you inevitably risk your reputation.
Despair is the greatest of our wanderings.
The changes required by the state usually occur independently of one's will.
The benefit of vice is always mixed with great harm.
The latest and most original book is the one that makes you love the old truths.
What remains in us from nature is more untamed and stronger than what we accumulate through study, experience, and reflection, for all art relaxes even as it corrects and perfects.
Only he who lives as if he were immortal is capable of great deeds. The more strong but contradictory passions a man possesses, the less he is able to excel in something.
The coward swallows fewer insults than the ambitious.
Conceited people are poor diplomats: they cannot be silent.
Reason is given to fly to the highest heights.
Man does not value his fellowmen enough to recognize that others are capable of high office. To posthumously recognize the merits of someone who successfully coped with this function - that's all we are capable of.