Pride destroys all symmetry and grace, and affectation is a more terrible enemy to fine faces than the smallpox.

Modesty never rages, never murmurs, never pout; when it is ill-treated, it pines, it beseeches, it languishes.

Tradition is not a fetish to he prayed to— but a useful record of experiences. Time should bring improvement—but not all old things are worthless. We are served by both the moderns and the ancients. The balanced man is he who clings to the best in the old—and appropriates the desirable in the new.

The person whom you favoured with a loan, if he be a good man, will think himself in your debt after he has paid you.

A true and genuine impudence is ever the effect of ignorance, without the least sense of it.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

To be exempt from the Passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing Solitude.

I look upon it as a Point of Morality, to be obliged by those who endeavour to oblige me.

The world is grown so full of dissimulation and compliment, that men’s words are hardly any signification of their thoughts.

It is a secret known but to few, yet of no small use in the conduct of life, that when you fall into a man’s conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.