Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.

Who likes not his business, his business likes not him.

No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.

The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.

The incentive to ambition is the love of power.

There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.

A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.