Keep your hands clean and pure from the infamous vice of corruption, a vice so infamous that it degrades even the other vices thatmay accompany it. Accept no present whatever; let your character in that respect be transparent and without the least speck, for as avarice is the vilest and dirtiest vice in private, corruption is so in public life.

Cottages have them (falsehood and dissimulation) as well as courts, only with worse manners.

Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.

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

To govern mankind, one must not overrate them.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.