Cottages have them (falsehood and dissimulation) as well as courts, only with worse manners.

A man of the best parts and greatest learning, if he does not know the world by his own experience and observation, will be very absurd, and consequently very unwelcome in company. He may say very good things; but they will be probably so ill-timed, misplaced, or improperly addressed, that he had much better hold his tongue.

In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.

I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.

Men are apt to mistake, or at least to seem to mistake, their own talents, in hopes, perhaps, of misleading others to allow them that which they are conscious they do not possess. Thus lord Hardwicke valued himself more upon being a great minister of state, which he certainly was not, than upon being a great magistrate, which he certainly was.

Anne of Austria (with great submission to a Crowned Head do I say it) was a B----. She had spirit and courage without parts, devotion without common morality, and lewdness without tenderness either to justify or to dignify it. Her two sons were no more Lewis the Thirteen's than they were mine.

An ignorant man is insignificant and contemptible; nobody cares for his company, and he can just be said to live, and that is all.