Choose your pleasures for yourself, and do not let them be imposed upon you.

At any age we must cherish illusions, consolatory or merely pleasant; in youth, they are omnipresent; in old age we must search for them, or even invent them. But with all that, boredom is their natural and inevitable accompaniment.

Virtue and learning, like gold, have their intrinsic value: but if they are not polished, they certainly lose a great deal of their luster: and even polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.

Of those who really love their sons, few know how to do it. Some spoil them when they are young, and then quarrel with them when they are grown up, for having been spoiled; some love them like mothers, and attend only to the bodily health and strength of the hopes of their family, solemnize his birthday, and rejoice, like the subjects of the Great Mogul, at the increase of his bulk: while others, minding, as they think, only essentials, take pains and pleasure to see in their heir, all their favourite weaknesses and imperfections.

Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it, genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies.

A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners.

Without any extraordinary effort of genius, I have discovered that nature was the same three thousand years ago as at present; that men were but men then as well as now; that modes and customs vary often, but that human nature is always the same. And I can no more suppose, that men were better, braver, or wiser, fifteen hundred or three thousand years ago, than I can suppose that the animals or vegetables were better than they are now.