It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.

We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.

Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.

Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.

Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.

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.

Comedy naturally wears itself out - destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.