Feebleness is more opposed to vice than virtue is. What makes the pangs of shame and jealousy so sharp is that our vanity cannot help us to support them. What makes the vanity of other persons so intolerable is that it hurts our own. We have not the courage to say in general that we have no defects, and that our enemies have no good qualities; but in matters of detail we are not very far from believing it. If we never flattered ourselves the flattery of others Would not injure us. We sometimes think we dislike flattery; we only dislike the way in which we are flattered. Flattery is a kind of bad money to which our vanity gives currency. Self-love, as it happens to be well or ill-conducted, constitutes virtue and vice. We are so prepossessed in our own favour that we often mistake for virtues those vices that bear some resemblance to them, and are artfully disguised by self-love. Nothing is so capable of lessening our self-love as the observation that we disapprove at one time what we approve at another. Self-love is the love of self, and of everything for the sake of self. When fortune gives the means, self-love makes men idolise themselves and tyrannise over others. It never rests or fixes itself anywhere outside its home. If it settle on external things, it is only as the bee does on flowers, to extract what may be serviceable. Nothing is so impetuous as its desires, nothing so secret as its designs, nothing so adroit as its conduct. We can neither fathom the depth, nor penetrate the obscurity of its abyss. There, concealed from the most piercing eye, it makes numberless turnings and windings; there is it often invisible even to itself; there it conceives, breeds, and cherishes, without being aware of it, an infinity of likings and hatreds; some of which are so monstrous that, having given birth to them, self-love either does not recognize them, or cannot bear to own them. From the darkness which covers self-love spring the ridiculous notions which it entertains of itself; thence its errors, ignorance, and silly mistakes; thence it imagines that its feelings are dead when they are but asleep; and thinks that it has lost all appetite when it is for the moment sated. But the thick mist which hides it from itself does not hinder it from seeing perfectly whatever is without; and thus it resembles the eye, that sees all things except itself. In great concerns and important affairs, where the violence of its desire excites its whole attention, it sees, perceives, understands, invents, suspects, penetrates, and divines all things; so that one is tempted to believe that each of its passions has its peculiar magic.