Whoever plays deep must necessarily lose his money or his character.

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.

Let your letter be written as accurately as you are able,--I mean with regard to language, grammar, and stops; for as to the matter of it the less trouble you give yourself the better it will be. Letters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them just what we should say to the persons if we were with them.

No man tastes pleasures truly, who does not earn them by previous business; and few people do business well, who do nothing else.

We are as often duped by diffidence as by confidence.

The scholar without good breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic.

Nature has hardly formed a woman ugly enough to be insensible to flattery upon her person.