Every single instance of a friend's insincerity increases our dependence on the efficacy of money.

I have been formerly so silly as to hope that every servant I had might be made a friend; I am now convinced that the nature of servitude generally bears a contrary tendency. People's characters are to be chiefly collected from their education and place in life; birth itself does but little.

In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem.

Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.

The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one.

A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects.

Men are sometimes accused of pride, merely because their accusers would be proud themselves were they in their places.