The friendship which is to be practised or expected by common mortals, must take its rise from mutual pleasure, and must end when the power ceases of delighting each other.

A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.

Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgment and friendship are like being enlivened.

It is the condition of our present state to see more than we can attain; the exactest vigilance and caution can never maintain a single day of unmingled innocence.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

None but those who have learned the art of subjecting their senses as well as reason to hypothetical systems can be persuaded by the most specious rhetorician that the lots of life are equal; yet it cannot be denied that every one has his peculiar pleasures and vexations, that external accidents operate variously upon different minds, and that no man can exactly judge from his own sensations what another would feel in the same circumstances.