The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, friendships, require a degree of good-breeding both to preserve and cement them.
In your friendships and in your enmities let your confidence and your hostilities have certain bounds; make not the former dangerous, nor the latter irreconcilable. There are strange vicissitudes in business.
We are as often duped by diffidence as by confidence.
Elegance of manner is the outgrowth of refined and exalted sense.
Everything is worth seeing once, and the more one sees the less one either wonders or admires.
Experience only can teach men not to prefer what strikes them for the present moment, to what will have much greater weight with the them hereafter.
Fear invites danger; concealed cowards insult known ones.
Very ugly or very beautiful women should be flattered on their understanding, and mediocre ones on their beauty.
Compliments of congratulation are always kindly taken, and cost nothing but pen, ink and paper. I consider them as draughts upon good breeding, where the exchange is always greatly in favor of the drawer.
I would have all intoleration intolerated in its turn.
Ugliness is a letter of credit for some special purposes.
Many new years you may see, but happy ones you cannot see without deserving them. These virtue, honor, and knowledge alone can merit, alone can produce.
It is by vivacity and wit that man shines in company; but trite jokes and loud laughter reduce him to a buffoon.
Women especially as to be talked to as below men, and above children.
Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.
I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire, which formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and however attended with smoke: but now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones.
Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in mixed company; it should only be treated among a very few people of learning, for mutual instruction. It is too awful and respectable a subject to become a familiar one.
Though we cannot totally change our nature, we may in great measure correct it by reflection and philosophy; and some philosophy is a very necessary companion in this world, where, even to the most fortunate, the chances are greatly against happiness.
Whatever poets may write, or fools believe, of rural innocence and truth, and of the perfidy of courts, this is most undoubtedly true, – that shepherds and ministers are both men; their natures and passions the same, the modes of them only different.
Next to clothes being fine, they should be well made, and worn easily; for a man is only the less genteel for a fine coat, if, in wearing it, he shows a regard for it, and is not as easy in it as if it was a plain one.