Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults of our pity, but affectation appears to be the only true source of the ridiculous.
It may be laid down as a general rule, that no woman who hath any great pretensions to admiration is ever well pleased in a company where she perceives herself to fill only the second place.
A good countenance is a letter of recommendation.
A man may go to heaven with half the pains it cost him to purchase hell.
What a silly fellow must he be who would do the devil’s work for free.
It is a good maxim to trust a person entirely or not at all.
Setting down in writing, is a lasting memory.
However exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true practical system can be learned only in the world.
It is admirably remarked, by a most excellent writer, that zeal can no more hurry a man to act in direct opposition to itself than a rapid stream can carry a boat against its own current.
When the effects of female jealousy do not appear openly in their proper colours of rage and fury, we may suspect that mischievous passion to be at work privately, and attempting to undermine, what it doth not attack above-ground.
Dancing begets warmth, which is the parent of wantonness. It is, Sir, the great grandfather of cuckoldom.
The greatest part of mankind labor under one delirium or another; and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in madness, but the species of it. The covetous, the prodigal, the superstitious, the libertine, and the coffee-house politician, are all Quixotes in their several ways.
Good-breeding is not confined to externals, much less to any particular dress or attitude of the body; it is the art of pleasing, or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of those with whom you converse.
Ingratitude never so thoroughly pierces the human breast as when it proceeds from those in whose behalf we have been guilty of transgressions.
Gravity is the best cloak for sin in all countries.
A grave aspect to a grave character is of much more consequence than the world is generally aware of; a barber may make you laugh, but a surgeon ought rather to make you cry.
The woman and the soldier who do not defend the first pass will never defend the last.
There are persons of that general philanthropy and easy tempers, which the world in contempt generally calls good-natured, who seem to be sent into the world with the same design with which men put little fish into a pike pond, in order only to be devoured by that voracious water-hero.
When I’m not thanked at all, I’m thanked enough.
It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying, which is terrible.
A good man therefore is a standing lesson to us all.