Jealousy is the fear or apprehension of superiority: envy our uneasiness under it.

The fund of sensible discourse is limited; that of jest and badinerie is infinite.

Fashion is a great restraint upon your persons of taste and fancy; who would otherwise in the most trifling instances be able to distinguish themselves from the vulgar.

Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed.

A person that would secure to himself great deference will, perhaps, gain his point by silence as effectually as by anything he can say.

I hate a style, as I do a garden, that is wholly flat and regular; that slides along like an eel, and never rises to what one can call an inequality.

Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former.