An honest private man often grows cruel and abandoned when converted into an absolute prince. Give a man power of doing what he pleases with impunity, you extinguish his fear, and consequently overturn in him one of the great pillars of morality.

A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.

The moral perfections of the Deity, the more attentively, we consider, the more perfectly still shall we know them.

There is nothing touches our imagination so much as a beautiful woman in a plain dress.

The passion for praise, which is so very vehement in the fair sex, produces excellent effects in women of sense, who desire to be admired for that which only deserves admiration.

The man who lives by hope, will die by hunger.

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.