Next to being witty, the best thing is being able to quote another's wit.

Pleasure and pain spring not so much from the nature of things, as from our manner of considering them. Pleasure, especially, is never an invariable effect of particular circumstances.

Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.

Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.

The next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to be able to quote another's wit.

Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.

Complaint is. more contemptible than pitiful.