Most people enjoy the inferiority of their best friends.

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

A seeming ignorance is very often a most necessary part of worldly knowledge. It is, for instance, commonly advisable to seem ignorant of what people offer to tell you; and when they say, Have not you heard of such a thing? to answer No, and to let them go on, though you know it already.

I could wish there were a treaty made between the French and the English theatres, in which both parties should make considerableconcessions. The English ought to give up their notorious violations of the unities, and all their massacres, racks, dead bodies, and mangled carcasses, which they so frequently exhibit upon their stage. The French should engage to have more action, and less declamation, and not to cram and to crowd things together to almost a degree of impossibility from a too scrupulous adherence to the unities.

Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way through the world.

To take a wife merely as an agreeable and rational companion, will commonly be found to be a grand mistake.

Instead of giving in to the greatest misfortune that can happen at my age, deafness, I busy myself in searching out all possible compensations, and I apply myself much more to all the amusements that are here within my grasp.