..to write and to live are very different. Many who praise virtue, do no more than praise it.

If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.

Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

Those who have past much of their lives in this great city, look upon its opulence and its multitudes, its extent and variety, with cold indifference; but an inhabitant of the remoter parts of the kingdom is immediately distinguished by a kind of dissipated curiosity, a busy endeavour to divide his attention amongst a thousand objects, and a wild confusion of astonishment and alarm.

Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence.

No man hates him at whom he can laugh.