Complaisance, though in itself it be scarce reckoned in the number of moral virtues, is that which gives a lustre to every talent a man can be possessed of. It was Plato's advice to an unpolished writer that he should sacrifice to the graces. In the same manner I would advise every man of learning, who would not appear in the world a mere scholar or philosopher, to make himself master of the social virtue which I have here mentioned.

Mere bashfulness without merit is awkwardness.

It is odd to consider the connection between despotism and barbarity, and how the making one person more than man makes the rest less.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as a habit of mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent.

A well regulated commerce is not, like law, physic, or divinity, to be overstocked with hands; but, on the contrary, flourishes by multitudes, and gives employment to all its professors.

There is nothing which one regards so much with an eye of mirth and pity as innocence when it has in it a dash of folly.