People hate who makes you feel one's inferiority.

Merit and knowledge will not gain hearts, though they will secure them when gained.

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

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

Singularity is only pardonable in old age and retirement; I may now be as singular as I please, but you may not.

To please people is a great step towards persuading them.

Vanity, or to call it by a gentler name, the desire of admiration and applause, is, perhaps, the most universal principle of humanactions.... Where that desire is wanting, we are apt to be indifferent, listless, indolent, and inert.... I will own to you, under the secrecy of confession, that my vanity has very often made me take great pains to make many a woman in love with me, if I could, for whose person I would not have given a pinch of snuff.