(Politeness is) a tacit agreement that people's miserable defects, whether moral or intellectual, shall on either side be ignored and not be made the subject of reproach.

For an act to be moral the intention must be based on compassion, not duty. We do something because we want to do it, because we feel we have to do it, not because we ought to do it. And even if our efforts fail - or we never even get to implement them - we are still moral because our motivation was based on compassion.

Rascals are always sociable, more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company.

Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. ... The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

Every human perfection is linked to an error which it threatens to turn into