Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.

It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.

A poor spirit is poorer than a poor purse. A very few pounds a year would ease a man of the scandal of avarice.

Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.

A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.

Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.