It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.
Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.
This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.
Always, Sir, set a high value on spontaneous kindness. he whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord, will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you.
He that thinks he can afford to be negligent is not far from being poor.
Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.
Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age.
I am very fond of the company of ladies. I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence.
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.
Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.
High people, sir, are the best; take a hundred ladies of quality, you’ll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other woman.
Fine clothes are good only as they supply the want of other means of procuring respect.
The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another; and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture.
Long customs are not easily broken; he that attempts to change the course of his own life very often labors in vain; and how shall we do that for others, which we are seldom able to do for ourselves.
Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.
Men have solicitude about fame; and the greater share they have of it, the more afraid they are of losing it.
It is necessary to the success of flattery, that it be accommodated to particular circumstances or characters, and enter the heart on that side where the passions are ready to receive it.
Flattery pleases very generally. In the first place, the flatterer may think what he says to be true; but, in the second place, whether he thinks so or not, he certainly thinks those whom he flatters of consequence enough to be flattered.
Happiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known; and such is the state or folly of man, that it is known only by experience of its contrary.
The fiction of happiness is propagated by every tongue and confirmed by every look till at last all profess the joy which they do not feel and consent to yield to the general delusion.