Jean de la Bruyère

Two persons cannot long be friends if they cannot forgive each other's little failings.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

It is fortunate to be of high birth, but it is no less so to be of such character that people do not care to know whether you are or are not.

Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.

The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others. He who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is perfectly well pleased with you.

If poverty is the mother of crime, lack of good sense is the father.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

If some persons died, and others did not die, death would be a terrible affliction.

As favor and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.

You may drive a dog off the King's armchair, and it will climb into the preacher's pulpit; he views the world unmoved, unembarrassed, unabashed.