A lively and agreeable man has not only the merit of liveliness and agreeableness himself, but that also of awakening them in others.

Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter.

Discernment is a power of the understanding in which few excel. Is not that owing to its connection with impartiality and truth? for are not prejudice and partiality blind?

Some characters are like some bodies in chemistry; very good, perhaps, in themselves, yet fly off and refuse the least conjunction with each other.

Despair gives the shocking ease to the mind that a mortification gives to the body.

True delicacy, as true generosity, is more wounded by an offence from itself--if I may be allowed the expression--than to itself.

I hardly know a sight that raises one's indignation more than that of an enlarged soul joined to a contracted fortune; unless it be that so much more common one, of a contracted soul joined to an enlarged fortune.