THE love of glory a virtue! A strange virtue truly, that calls to its aid the co-operation of all the vices, that finds stimulants in ambition, envy, vanity, sometimes even avarice! Would Titus have been Titus had he had as his ministers Sejanus, Narcissus, and Tigellinus? * * * * * IN order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. ’Tis a necessary evil. * * * * * THOUGHT consoles us for all, and heals all. If at times it does you ill, ask it for the remedy for that ill and it will give it you. * * * * * THAT to feel makes one think is pretty generally admitted; that to think makes one feel finds less acceptance, but is almost as true. * * * * * THE intelligence is often to the heart what the library of a mansion is to the person of its master. * * * * * A BAD man will occasionally do a good action. One might say that he wishes to see whether it gives as much pleasure as honest folk assert. * * * * * STUPIDITY would not be absolute stupidity did it not fear intelligence. Vice would not be absolute vice did it not hate virtue. * * * * * ONE suspects the idleness of a knave and the silence of a fool. * * * * * GENEROSITY is the pitifulness of noble hearts. * * * * * ALL passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions. * * * * * “THE manner in which I see you distributing praise and blame,” said M. de B---- to a friend, “would make the best man in the world anxious to be defamed.” * * * * * FALSE modesty is the most decent of all deceptions. * * * * * THERE are certain failings that preserve one from some epidemic vices, just as it may be noted that in time of plague fever-stricken patients escape contagion. * * * * * THE philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out. * * * * * ONE of the great misfortunes of man is that even his good qualities are sometimes useless to him, and that the art of profiting by them and governing them wisely is often the tardy fruit of experience alone. * * * * * NATURE in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.