"Penetration has an air of divination; it..." - Quote by Francois De La Rochefoucauld

“We always love those who admire us, but we do not always love those whom we admire.”

“Love, like fire, cannot subsist without constant impulse; it ceases to live from the moment it ceases to hope or to fear.”

“In friendship, as in love, we are often more happy from the things we are ignorant of than from those we are acquainted with.”

“What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?”

“For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.”

“I simply can´t resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.”

“Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.”

“When the vain speaker has sat down, and the people say 'what a good speech,' it still takes an ounce to balance an ounce.”

“The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.”