I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.

Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.

It might be argued, that to be a knave is the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary to be a learned man.

Grace in women has more effect than beauty.

Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.

Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.

Books wind into the heart.