Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.

I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.

Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.

Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.

A man who does not endeavour to seem more than he is will generally be thought nothing of. We habitually make such large deductions for pretence and imposture that no real merit will stand against them. It is necessary to set off our good qualities with a certain air of plausibility and self-importance, as some attention to fashion is necessary.

Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue; and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves.

To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.