When a man has been guilty of any vice or folly, the best atonement he can make for it is to warn others not to fall into the like.

Persons in great stations have seldom their true character drawn till several years after their death. Their personal friendships and enmities must cease, and the parties they were engaged in be at an end, before their faults or their virtues can have justice done them. When writers have the least opportunities of knowing the truth, they are in the best disposition to tell it.

The first of all virtues is innocence; the next is modesty. If we banish modesty out of the world, she carries away with her half the virtue that is in it.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind

It is folly to seek the approbation of any being besides the Supreme.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.

Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.