Friendship * * * is a long time in forming, it is of slow growth, through many trials and months of familiarity.

Praise, of all things, is the most powerful excitement to commendable actions, and animates us in our enterprises.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

They who, without any previous knowledge of us, think amiss of us, do us no harm; they attack not us, but the phantom of their own imagination.

I am told so many ill things of a man, and I see so few in him, that I begin to suspect he has a real but troublesome merit, as being likely to eclipse that of others.

Women are extreme; they are better than men, or worse.

The pleasure a man of honor enjoys in the consciousness of having performed his duty is a reward he pays himself for all his pains.