Believe all the good you can of everyone. Do not measure others by yourself. If they have advantages which you have not, let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune. Envy no one, and you need envy no one.

The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.

In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.

The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.

One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.

We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.

If our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note of them as the dial does of those that are clouded.