"The most violent passions sometimes leave us..." - Quote by Francois De La Rochefoucauld

“They that apply themselves to trifling matters commonly become incapable of great ones.”

“Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.”

“We love everything on our own account; we even follow our own taste and inclination when we prefer our friends to ourselves; and yet it is this preference alone that constitutes true and perfect friendship.”

“Vanity can apply to both insecurity and egotism.”

“Light vanity, insatiate cormorant, Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.”

“That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once: how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain's jaw-bone, that did the first murder! It might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o'er-reaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?”

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

“Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.”

“It is a mighty error to suppose that none but violent and strong passions, such as love and ambition, are able to vanquish the rest. Even idleness, as feeble and languishing as it is, sometimes reigns over them; it usurps the throne and sits paramount over all the designs and actions of our lives, and imperceptibly wastes and destroys all our passions and all our virtues.”