Keep your own secret, and get out other people's. Keep your own temper, and artfully warm other people's. Counterwork your rivalswith diligence and dexterity, but at the same time with the utmost personal civility to them: and be firm without heat.

Many new years you may see, but happy ones you cannot see without deserving them. These virtue, honor, and knowledge alone can merit, alone can produce.

Knowledge is a comfortable and necessary retreat and shelter for us in an advanced age; and if we do not plant it while young, it will give us no shade when we grow old.

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.

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

A wise man will live as much within his wit as his income.... Bear this truth always in your mind, that you may be admired for your wit, if you have any; but that nothing but good sense and good qualities can make you be loved.

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