Riches and power are but gifts of blind fate, whereas goodness is the result of one's own merits.

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

Tea seems to tenderize cheap cuts of beef. After cooking chuck, boiling beef and brisket (I even mixed rib eye, which is ever so cheap, and it's great) I have decided that the tannic acid in the tea is what tenderizes beef!

Don't assume you're always going to be understood. I wrote in a column that one should put a cup of liquid in the cavity of a turkey when roasting it. Someone wrote me that 'the turkey tasted great, but the plastic cup melted.

I am convinced by a sad experience that it is natural to avoid those to whom we have been too much obliged, and that uncommon generosity causes neglect rather than gratitude.

Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious!

If a picture, which is but a mute representation of an object, can give such pleasure, what cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions, they can raise them as much as if the persons themselves were present; they have all the tenderness and the delicacy of speech, and sometimes a boldness of expression even beyond it.