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.

Borrowed wit is the poorest wit.

Him, who incessantly laughs in the street, you may commonly hear grumbling in his closet.

When you doubt between words, use the plainest, the commonest, the most idiomatic. Eschew fine words as you would rouge; love simple ones as you would the native roses on your cheek.

He who can at all times sacrifice pleasure to duty approaches sublimity.

He submits himself to be seen through a microscope, who suffers himself to be caught in a fit of passion.

Words are the wings of actions.