The more one works, the more willing one is to work.

If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.

Firmness of purpose is one of the best instruments of success.

He makes people pleased with him by making them first pleased with themselves.

To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure which I have made in life.

To write anything tolerable, the mind must be in a natural, proper disposition; provocatives, in that case, as well as in another,will only produce miserable, abortive performances.

Study the heart and the mind of man, and begin with your own. Meditation and reflection must lay the foundation of that knowledge, but experience and practice must, and alone can, complete it.