Listening well and answering well is one of the greatest perfections that can be obtained in conversation.

How can we accept another to keep our secret if we have been unable to keep it ourselves.

We should often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives behind them.

Timidity is a fault for which it is dangerous to reprove persons whom we wish to correct of it.

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

There is such a thing as a general revolution which changes the taste of men as it changes the fortunes of the world.

Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.

In the human heart new passions are forever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another.

If we resist our passions, it is more through their weakness than from our strength.

The passions are the only orators which always persuade.