Quotes from la bruyere jean de v

When a plain-looking woman is loved, it is certain to be very passionately ; for either her influence on her lover is irresistible, or she has some secret and more irresistible charms than those of beauty.

We never love with all our heart and all our soul but once, and that is the first time.

Two persons will not be friends long if they are not inclined to pardon each other's little failings.

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.

The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself.

It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all.

If it be usual to be strongly impressed by things that are scarce, why are we so little impressed by virtue?

False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

All the worth of some people lies in their name; upon a closer inspection it dwindles to nothing, but from a distance it deceives us.

A long disease seems to be a halting place between life and death, that death itself may be a comfort to those who die and to those who are left behind.

We come too late to say anything which has not been said already.

There is nothing men are so anxious to keep, and yet are so careless about, as life.

There are certain people who so ardently and so passionately desire a thing, that from dread of losing it they leave nothing undone to make them lose it.

Life is short and tedious, and is wholly spent in wishing; we trust to find rest and enjoyment at some future time, often at an age when our best blessings, youth and health, have already left us. When at last I that time has arrived, it surprises us in the midst of fresh desires; we have got no farther when we are attacked by a fever which kills us; if we had been cured, it would only have been to give us more time for other desires.

We ought not to make those people our enemies who might have become our friends, if we had only known them better.

There are few wives so perfect as not to give their husbands at least once a day good reason to repent of ever having married, or at least of envying those who are unmarried.

Some people pretend they never were in love and never wrote poetry; two weaknesses which they dare not own -- one of the heart, the other of the mind.

Men regret their life has been ill-spent, but this does not always induce them to make a better use of the time they have yet to live.