If a man does not have enough imagination to adduce evidence to support a lie, it is better to tell the truth from the start.
The path of paradoxes is the path of truth. To verify reality, you have to see it on a tightrope. When truths become acrobats, we can judge them.
The good, like the beautiful, can be subject to the criterion of truth: it is only what seems true to us in the moral sphere, and the beautiful what seems true to us in the aesthetic sphere...
Truth is the most comprehensive notion that the human spirit can construct, for it reproduces adaptation to reality or to the postulates of the nation.
I know that I do not know what I do not know: I envy those who will know more, but I do not know that they will have to, like me, measure, weigh, deduce and not trust the deductions made, to discern the part of truth from error, and in truth to account for the eternal mixture of error...
I've never stuck to an idea for fear of the mess I'd be in without it. I have never stretched a true fact with the juice of a lie, so that I could digest it better.
Envy eats the envious like rust eats iron.
Envy: ... a kind of sadness for the happiness that seems to be enjoyed by our peers.
The best sign of delight is exaggeration.
Admiration is the primary and ardent form of knowledge, a knowledge that praises its object, that values it.
The supreme flatterer, with whom all petty flatterers are in agreement, is our own self.
Envy is always related to a comparison with ourselves; where there is no comparison, there is no envy.
People allow us to rise however high above them, but they never forgive us for not stooping as low as they do. So that the sympathy they give to the chosen characters, is not without some hatred, and fear too much honor means to them a tacit blame which they forgive neither the living nor the dead.
Envy is the terrible treasure of our disappointed hopes, of our stillborn talents, of our missed successes, of our wounded claims.
He who has no merit always envies the merit of others.
Admiration given too quickly is a sign of weakness.
Envy unties tongues, as admiration silences them.
Those who wish to excel in too many things, out of ease and vanity, are always envious. For they cannot lack reasons for envy, being unable not to surpass them in any of these things.
There is no greater flatterer of man than himself.
Is it possible for a creature in eternal struggle with himself, or enmity with life, to leave others in peace and not spoil their happiness?
The true flatterer must be a moralist: to discover in the flattered the virtues which the latter would be happy to have.
Loud, truly, is only he who has the courage to drive away his flatterers with the whip. Of course, the fiercest adversaries are recruited from disappointed flatterers.
You have to collect the stones that are thrown at you; they are the beginning of a pedestal.
Admiration: Polite recognition of another's likeness to us.
Envy: emulation tailored to meager capabilities.
It is a sublime thing as another, above you to reckon
Admiration:... the supreme joy of understanding.
When the world praises you, examine yourself if you are what people say you are; but you are not proud of this either.
Does not every true man feel that he exalts himself when he respects that which really stands above him?
Everyone manifests their envy through an attitude of superiority.