Be not affronted at a joke. If one throw salt at thee, thou wilt receive no harm, unless thou art raw.

True genius walks along a line, and, perhaps, our greatest pleasure is in seeing it so often near falling, without being ever actually down.

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

Every acknowledgment of gratitude is a circumstance of humiliation; and some are found to submit to frequent mortifications of this kind, proclaiming what obligations they owe, merely because they think it in some measure cancels the debt.

To be poor, and to seem poor, is a certain method never to rise.

In my time, the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stagecoach.

I have known a German Prince with more titles than subjects, and a Spanish nobleman with more names than shirts.