Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different.
If you can once engage people’s pride, love, pity, ambition on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.
He makes people pleased with him by making them first pleased with themselves.
The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one’s self to be acquainted with it.
Learning is acquired by reading books, but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various facets of them.
A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.
Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him.
Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.
The heart never grows better by age; I fear rather worse, always harder. A young liar will be an old one, and a young knave will only be a greater knave as he grows older.
I sometimes give myself admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it.
Let your enemies be disarmed by the gentleness of your manner, but at the same time let them feel, the steadiness of your resentment.
There is nothing that people bear more impatiently, or forgive less, than contempt: and an injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.
Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners.
Persist and persevere, and you will find most things that are attainable, possible.
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.
A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income.
Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.
Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not merely pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one.
Our own self-love draws a thick veil between us and our faults.