There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books and papers in order--that is, according to their notions of the matter--and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor anybody else can find them. This is a sort of magpie faculty. If anything is left where you want it, it is called litter. There is a pedantry in housewifery, as well as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he could not see comfortably to work again for several days.

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

Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.

If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.

We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.