In order to judge of the inside of others, study your own; for men in general are very much alike; and though one has one prevailing passion, and another has another, yet their operations are much the same; and whatever engages or disgusts, pleases or offends you, in others, will, mutatis mutandis, engage, disgust, please, or offend others, in you.

An able man shows his spirit by gentle words and resolute actions.

Six, or at most seven, hours' sleep is, for a constancy, as much as you or anybody else can want; more is only laziness and dozing, and is, I am persuaded, both unwholesome and stupefying.

There is a sort of veteran women of condition, who, having lived always in the grand mode, and having possibly had some gallantries, together with the experience of five and twenty or thirty years, form a young fellow better than all the rules that can be given him.

Everything is worth seeing once, and the more one sees the less one either wonders or admires.

The difference between a man of sense and a fop is that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time he knows he must not neglect it.

I could wish there were a treaty made between the French and the English theatres, in which both parties should make considerableconcessions. The English ought to give up their notorious violations of the unities, and all their massacres, racks, dead bodies, and mangled carcasses, which they so frequently exhibit upon their stage. The French should engage to have more action, and less declamation, and not to cram and to crowd things together to almost a degree of impossibility from a too scrupulous adherence to the unities.