Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality.

A small country town is not the place in which one would choose to quarrel with a wife; every human being in such places is a spy.

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

It is a maxim that no man was ever enslaved by influence while he was fit to be free.

He that is pushing his predecessors into the gulf of obscurity, cannot but sometimes suspect, that he must himself sink in like manner, and, as he stands upon the same precipice, be swept away with the same violence.

It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.