(30 selected maxims)

1. True love is like ghosts: everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.

2. No disguise can long conceal love where it exists, nor can any artifice successfully imitate it where it does not.

3. There are people who would never have fallen in love if they had never heard love spoken of.

4. In love, absence diminishes small passions and strengthens great ones, just as the wind extinguishes a candle but fans a fire.

5. There is more self-love than love in jealousy.

6. As long as we love, we forgive.

7. In love, the one who recovers first recovers best.

8. What people call friendship is often nothing more than an exchange of interests and good offices, a kind of arrangement from which self-love always expects to gain something.

9. Self-love magnifies or diminishes the good qualities of our friends according to the satisfaction they give us; we judge their worth by the way they treat us.

10. In friendship, as in love, we are often happier because of what we do not know than because of what we know.

11. We easily forgive our friends, provided their faults do not affect us.

12. If we had no faults of our own, we would take less pleasure in noticing the faults of others.

13. The mind is forever the dupe of the heart.

14. We admit to small faults in order to persuade others that we have no great ones.

15. We think there are few reasonable people, and we consider reasonable only those who share our opinions.

16. It would be better to let others see us as we are than to struggle to appear as we are not.

17. We should not be offended when others hide the truth from us, since we so often hide it from ourselves.

18. We are quick to criticize the faults of others, but slow to use them to correct our own.

19. We are never as happy as we imagine, nor as unhappy as we believe.

20. Since the person who needs little is the happiest, the great and ambitious are often the most unhappy, because they require countless things in order to be satisfied.

21. Before passionately desiring something, we should consider how happy the person who already possesses it really is.

22. In the end, we would passionately desire very few things if we truly knew what we wanted.

23. Hope, though often a deceptive enchantress, leads us pleasantly along the road to the end of life.

24. Hope and fear are inseparable: there is no fear without hope and no hope without fear.

25. As mortals, we fear everything; yet we desire everything as though we were immortal.

26. Fortune cures us of many faults that reason could never cure.

27. We should treat fortune as we treat health: enjoy it when it is good, endure it when it is bad, and resort to extreme remedies only when absolutely necessary.

28. In great undertakings, we should concentrate less on creating opportunities than on taking advantage of those that arise.

29. Virtue would not travel so far if vanity did not keep it company along the way.

30. We would often blush for our noblest actions if the world could see the true motives behind them.