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.

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.

Pleasure is the rock which most young people split upon; they launch out with crowded sails in quest of it, but without a compassto direct their course, or reason sufficient to steer the vessel; for want of which, pain and shame, instead of pleasure, are the returns of their voyage.

It seems to me that physical sickness softens, just as moral sickness hardens, the heart.

Women are all so far Machiavellians that they are never either good or bad by halves; their passions are too strong, and their reason too weak, to do anything with moderation.

You must embrace the man you hate, if you cannot be justified in knocking him down.

The only solid and lasting peace between a man and his wife is, doubtless, a separation.