How seldom is generosity perfect and pure! How often do men give because it throws a certain inferiority on those who receive, and superiority on themselves!

Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.

If they who understand the utmost refinement of any art will enjoy the perfection of it in a manner superior to other men, will they not amply pay for that advantage in feeling more than other men the imperfection of it, which in the natural course of things must so much oftener fall in their way?

It is so much in the nature of men to overreach and deceive one another, that their very sports and plays are founded on that principle.

It is in numberless instances happier to have a false opinion which we believe true, than a true one of which we doubt.

The criterion of true beauty is that it increases on examination; if false, that it lessens.

It by no means follows, that because two men utter the same words, they have precisely the same idea which they mean to express: language is inadequate to the variety of ideas which are conceived by different minds, and which, could they be expressed, would produce a new variety of characteristic differences between man and man.