Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.

We prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person's.

We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues.

Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.

To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.

Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.

It is only necessary to raise a bugbear before the English imagination in order to govern it at will. Whatever they hate or fear, they implicitly believe in, merely from the scope it gives to these passions.