The greatest of characters, no doubt, would be he, who, free of all trifling accidental helps, could see objects through one grand immutable medium, always at hand, and proof against illusion and time, reflecting every object in its true shape and colour through all the fluctuation of things.

No communication or gift can exhaust genius or impoverish charity.

Man without religion is a diseased creature, who would persuade himself he is well and needs not a physician; but woman without religion is raging and monstrous.

Truth, wisdom, love, seek reasons; malice only seeks causes.

His calumny is not only the greatest benefit a rogue can confer on us, but the only service he will perform for nothing.

Avoid connecting yourself with characters whose good and bad sides are unmixed and have not fermented together; they resemble vials of vinegar and oil; or palletts set with colors; they are either excellent at home and insufferable abroad, or intolerable within doors and excellent in public; they are unfit for friendship, merely because their stamina, their ingredients of character are too single, too much apart; let them be finely ground up with each other, and they are incomparable.

Mistrust the man who finds everything good, the man who finds everything evil and still more the man who is indifferent to everything.