Repartee is precisely the touchstone of the man of wit. [ Moliere ]

The impromptu reply is precisely the touchstone of the man of wit. [ Moliere ]

Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth. [ Balzac ]

Great passions are incurable diseases; what might heal them is precisely that which makes them so dangerous. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

In the opinion of the world marriage ends all, as it does in a comedy. The truth is precisely the reverse; it begins all. [ Mme. Swetchine ]

Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust. [ Lowell ]

Be neither too early in the fashion, nor too long out of it, nor too precisely in it; what custom hath civilized is become decent, till then ridiculous; where the eye is the jury thy apparel is the evidence. [ Quarles ]

One could not wish any man to fall into a fault; yet it is often precisely after a fault, or a crime even, that the morality which is in a man first unfolds itself, and what of strength he as a man possesses, now when all else is gone from him. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Evil, what we call evil, must ever exist while man exists; evil, in the widest sense we can give it, is precisely the dark, disordered material out of which man's freewill has to create an edifice of order and good. Ever must pain urge us to labour; and only in free effort can any blessedness be imagined for us. [ Carlyle ]

Equality is deemed by many a mere speculative chimera, which can never be reduced to practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we ought not to try at least to mitigate it? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of the legislature must always tend to maintain it. [ Rousseau ]