There is hardly any place or any company where you may not gain knowledge, if you please; almost everybody knows some one thing, and is glad to talk about that one thing.

Vulgarism in language is the distinguishing characteristic of bad company, and a bad education. A man of fashion avoids nothing with more care than that. Proverbial expressions, and trite sayings, are the flowers of the rhetoric of vulgar man.

Horse-play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, and indiscriminate familiarity, will sink both merit and knowledge into a degree of contempt. They compose at most a merry fellow; and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man.

A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share in another.

It is often more necessary to conceal contempt than resentment; the former is never forgiven, but the later is sometimes forgotten.

Wrongs are often forgiven; but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever.

Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings; but those who are in a state of mediocrity are best flattered upon their beauty, or at least their graces; for every woman who is not absolutely ugly thinks herself handsome.