High people, sir, are the best; take a hundred ladies of quality, you'll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other woman.

I am sorry I have not learnt to play at cards. It is very useful in life: it generates kindness, and consolidates society.

When a man marries a widow his jealousies revert to the past: no man is as good as his wife says her first husband was

I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing.

Nothing concentrates one's mind so much as the realization that one is going to be hanged in the morning!