A person can't help their birth.

Diffidence is a sort of false modesty.

Time passes, Time the consoler, Time the anodyne.

Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?

Come forward, some great marshal, and organize equality in society, and your rod shall swallow up all the juggling old court gold-sticks

it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody

As nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own, too; and yet we, O foolish race! must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches!