It was a saying of an ancient philosopher, which I find some of our writers have ascribed to Queen Elizabeth, who perhaps might have taken occasion to repeat it, that a good face is a letter of recommendation.
Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible.
The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out of a proper method to catch the reader’s eye; without which, a good thing may pass over unobserved, or lost among commissions of bankrupt.
Sweet are the slumbers of the virtuous man.
Beauty commonly produces love, but cleanliness preserves it. Age itself is not unamiable while it is preserved clean and unsullied; like a piece of metal constantly kept smooth and bright, we look on it with more pleasure than on a new vessel cankered with rust.
Music can noble hints impart, Engender fury, kindle love, With unsuspected eloquence can move, And manage all the man with secret art.
In the loss of an object we do not proportion our grief to the real value it bears, but to the value our fancies set upon it.
Plenty of people wish to become devout, but no one wishes to be humble.
The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.
Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant.
The productions of a great genius, with many lapses and inadvertences, are infinitely preferable to the works of an inferior kind of author which are scrupulously exact, and conformable to all the rules of correct writing.
It is wonderful to see persons of sense passing away a dozen hours together in shuffling and dividing a pack of cards.
Why will any man be so impertinently officious as to tell me all prospect of a future state is only fancy and delusion? Is there any merit in being the messenger of ill news. If it is a dream, let me enjoy it, since it makes me both the happier and better man.
There is nothing which one regards so much with an eye of mirth and pity as innocence when it has in it a dash of folly.
E’en the rough rocks with tender myrtle bloom, and trodden weeds send out a rich perfume.
The most skillful flattery is to let a person talk on, and be a listener.
We see the pernicious effects of luxury in the ancient Romans, who immediately found themselves poor as soon as this vice got footing among them.
What can that man fear who takes care to please a Being that is able to crush all his adversaries?
Were a man’s sorrows and disquietudes summed up at the end of his life, it would generally be found that he had suffered more from the apprehension of such evils as never happened to him than from those evils which had really befallen him.
One may know a man that never conversed in the world, by his excess of good-breeding.