475.--The desire to be pitied or to be admired often forms the greater part of our confidence. 476.--Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy. 477.--The same firmness that enables us to resist love enables us to make our resistance durable and lasting. So weak persons who are always excited by passions are seldom really possessed of any. 478.--Fancy does not enable us to invent so many different contradictions as there are by nature in every heart. 479.--It is only people who possess firmness who can possess true gentleness. In those who appear gentle it is generally only weakness, which is readily converted into harshness. 480.--Timidity is a fault which is dangerous to blame in those we desire to cure of it. 481.--Nothing is rarer than true good nature, those who think they have it are generally only pliant or weak. 482.--The mind attaches itself by idleness and habit to whatever is easy or pleasant. This habit always places bounds to our knowledge, and no one has ever yet taken the pains to enlarge and expand his mind to the full extent of its capacities. 483.--Usually we are more satirical from vanity than malice. 484.--When the heart is still disturbed by the relics of a passion it is proner to take up a new one than when wholly cured. 485.--Those who have had great passions often find all their lives made miserable in being cured of them. 486.--More persons exist without self-love than without envy. ["I do not believe that there is a human creature in his senses arrived at maturity, that at some time or other has not been carried away by this passion (envy) in good earnest, and yet I never met with any who dared own he was guilty of it, but in jest."--Mandeville: Fable Of The Bees; Remark N.] 487.--We have more idleness in the mind than in the body. 488.--The calm or disturbance of our mind does not depend so much on what we regard as the more important things of life, as in a judicious or injudicious arrangement of the little things of daily occurrence. 489.--However wicked men may be, they do not dare openly to appear the enemies of virtue, and when they desire to persecute her they either pretend to believe her false or attribute crimes to her. 490.--We often go from love to ambition, but we never return from ambition to love. ["Men commence by love, finish by ambition, and do not find a quieter seat while they remain there."--La Bruyere: Du Coeur.] 491.--Extreme avarice is nearly always mistaken, there is no passion which is oftener further away from its mark, nor upon which the present has so much power to the prejudice of the future. 492.--Avarice often produces opposite results: there are an infinite number of persons who sacrifice their property to doubtful and distant expectations, others mistake great future advantages for small present interests.