Ridicule is the best test of truth.

Inferiority is what you enjoy in your best friends.

A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.

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.

The best way to compel weak-minded people to adopt our opinion, is to frighten them from all others, by magnifying their danger.

Mankind is made up of inconsistencies, and no man acts invariably up to his predominant character. The wisest man sometimes acts weakly, and the weakest sometimes wisely.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.