Immoderate assurance is perfect licentiousness.

Reserve is no more essentially connected with understanding than a church organ with devotion, or wine with good-nature.

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

There would not be any absolute necessity for reserve if the world were honest; yet even then it would prove expedient. For, in order to attain any degree of deference, it seems necessary that people should imagine you have more accomplishments than you discover.

Persons are oftentimes misled in regard to their choice of dress by attending to the beauty of colors, rather than selecting such colors as may increase their own beauty.

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

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