Neither refinement nor delicacy is indispensable to produce elegance.

It is a poor wit who lives by borrowing the words, decisions, mien, inventions and actions of others.

Close thine ear against him that shall open his mouth secretly against another. If thou receivest not his words, they fly back and wound the reporter. If thou dost receive them, they fly forward and wound the receiver.

He who reforms himself has done more towards reforming the public than a crowd or noisy, impotent patriots.

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.

He who, in questions of right, virtue, or duty, sets himself above all ridicule, is truly great, and shall laugh in the end with truer mirth than ever he was laughed at.

Be neither too early in the fashion, nor too long out of it; nor at any time in the extremes of it.