There is nothing that people bear more impatiently, or forgive less, than contempt: and an injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.

Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings.

Many young people adopt pleasures for which they have not the least taste, only because they are called by that name.... You mustallow that drunkenness, which is equally destructive to body and mind, is a fine pleasure. Gaming, that draws you into a thousand scraps, leaves you penniless, and gives you the air and manners of an outrageous madman, is another most exquisite pleasure, is it not? As to running after women, the consequences of that vice are only the loss of one's nose, the total destruction of health, and, not unfrequently, the being run through the body.

If you will please people, you must please them in their own way; and as you cannot make them what they should be, you must take them as they are.

A certain degree of fear produces the same effects as rashness.

Good-breeding carries along with it a dignity that is respected by the most petulant. Ill-breeding invites and authorizes the familiarity of the most timid.

Awkwardness is a more real disadvantage than it is generally thought to be; it often occasions ridicule, it always lessens dignity.