Merit rather enforces respect than attracts fondness.

Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.

Most men think indistinctly, and therefore cannot speak with exactness . . .

There is no kind of idleness by which we are so easily seduced as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business.

Where there is emulation, there will be vanity; where there is vanity, there will be folly.

Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals, or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other.

Change is not made without inconvenience.