The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.
To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.
Avarice is the miser’s dream, as fame is the poet’s.
Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
The greatest offence against virtue is to speak ill of it.
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves for a while from, the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth.
Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.
It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying on itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things.
The Irish are hearty, the Scotch plausible, the French polite, the Germans good-natured, the Italians courtly, the Spaniards reserved and decorous – the English alone seem to exist in taking and giving offense.
True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves – neither more nor less.
To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.
A lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom.
The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.
Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.
Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.
Charity, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Next to putting it in a bank, men like to squander their superfluous wealth on those to whom it is sure to be doing the least possible good.
Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing; but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.
The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.