To hear complaints with patience, even when complaints are vain, is one of the duties of friendship.

Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.

As all error is meanness, it is incumbent on every man who consults his own dignity, to retract it as soon as he discovers it.

The common people do not accurately adapt their thoughts to objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their words to their thoughts; they do not mean to lie; but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial; if anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in this way they go on.

One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past.

Smoking is a shocking thing - blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us.

In most ages many countries have had part of their inhabitants in a state of slavery; yet it may be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed the natural condition of man. It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal; and very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to another but by violent compulsion. An individual may, indeed, forfeit his liberty by a crime; but he cannot by that crime forfeit the liberty of his children.