We should only affect compassion, and carefully avoid having any.

It may be said that the vices await us in the journey of life like hosts with whom we must successively lodge; and I doubt whether experience would make us avoid them if we were to travel the same road a second time.

Ideas often flash across our minds more complete than we could make them after much labor.

There are few people who are more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be so.

A lofty mind always thinks nobly, it easily creates vivid, agreeable, and natural fancies, places them in their best light, clothes them with all appropriate adornments, studies others' tastes, and clears away from its own thoughts all that is useless and disagreeable.

The only good copies are those which make us see the absurdity of bad originals.

Second-rate minds usually condemn everything beyond their grasp.