Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature.

A fine coat is but a livery when the person who wears it discovers no higher sense than that of a footman.

A cloudy day or a little sunshine have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most recent blessings or misfortunes.

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.

Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

Our Grub-street biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers on purpose to make a penny of him.