I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher.

Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.

Quotations are best brought in to confirm some opinion controverted.

A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.

The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.