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.

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.

Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.

Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method.

A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.

Nothing sharpens the arrow of sarcasm so keenly as the courtesy that polishes it; no reproach is like that we clothe with a smile and present with a bow.

Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.