Singularity is only pardonable in old age and retirement; I may now be as singular as I please, but you may not.

Distrust those who love you extremely upon a slight acquaintance, and without any visible reason.

Keep your own secret, and get out other people's. Keep your own temper, and artfully warm other people's. Counterwork your rivalswith diligence and dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to them: and be firm without heat.

The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion.

Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.

It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, one procrastinates, one can do it when one will, and therefore one seldom does it at all.

A learned parson, rusting in his cell at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well upon the nature of man; will profoundly analyze the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the senses, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what ; and yet, unfortunately, he knows nothing of man... He views man as he does colours in Sir Isaac Newton's prism, where only the capital ones are seen; but an experienced dyer knows all their various shades and gradations, together with the result of their several mixtures.