Widows, like ripe fruit, drop easily from their perch.

There are few wives so perfect as not to give their husbands at least once a day good reason to repent of ever having married, or at least of envying those who are unmarried.

Caprice in woman is the antidote to beauty.

Misers are neither relations, nor friends, nor citizens, nor Christians, nor perhaps even human beings.

Discretion is the perfection of reason, and a guide to us in all the duties of life; cunning is a kind of instinct, that only looks out after our immediate interests and welfare. Discretion is only found in men of strong sense and good understanding; cunning is often to be met with in brutes themselves, and in persons who are but the fewest removes from them.

There are only two ways by which to rise in this world, either by one's own industry or by the stupidity of others.

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.