It is useless to be young without being beautiful, or beautiful without being young. - François de La Rochefoucauld

La vérité ne fait pas tant de bien dans le monde que ses apparences y font de mal.

The greatest of all gifts is the power to estimate things at their true worth.

Afflictions give rise to various kinds of hypocrisy: in one, pretending to weep over the loss of someone dear to us we really weep for ourselves, since we miss that person's good opinion of us or deplore some curtailment of our wealth, pleasure, or position. The dead, therefore, are honored by tears shed for the living alone. I call this a kind of hypocrisy because in afflictions of this sort we deceive ourselves. There is another hypocrisy, less innocent because aimed at the world at large: the affliction of certain persons who aspire to the glory of a beautiful, immortal sorrow. Time, the universal destroyer, has taken away the grief they really felt, but still they obstinately go on weeping, wailing, and sighing; they are acting a mournful part and striving to make all their actions prove that their distress will only end with their lives. This miserable and tiresome vanity is usually found in ambitious women, for as their sex precludes them from all the roads to glory they seek celebrity by a display of inconsolable affliction. There is yet another kind of tears that rise from shallow springs and flow or dry up at will: people shed them so as to be pitied or wept over, or, finally, to avoid the disgrace of not weeping