One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.

We hope to grow old and we dread old age; that is to say, we love life and we flee from death.

A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.

How much wit, good-nature, indulgences, how many good offices and civilities, are required among friends to accomplish in some years what a lovely face or a fine hand does in a minute!

It is very rare to find ground which produces nothing; if it is not covered with flowers, with fruit trees and grains, it produces briers and pines. It is the same with man; if he is not virtuous, he becomes vicious.

A man reveals his character even in the simplest things he does.

Criticism is as often a trade as a science, requiring, as it does, more health than wit, more labour than capacity, more practice than genius.