Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours.

To divest one's self of some prejudices would be like taking off the skin to feel the better.

Good-humor will sometimes conquer ill-humor, but ill-humor will conquer it oftener; and for this plain reason, good-humor must operate on generosity, ill-humor on meanness.

I hardly know so melancholy a reflection as that parents are necessarily the sole directors of the management of children, whether they have or have not judgment, penetration or taste to perform the task.

Those men who are commended by everybody must be very extraordinary men; or, which is more probable, very inconsiderable men.

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

I have often thought that the nature of women was interior to that of men in general, but superior in particular.