“Good-breeding is the art of showing men, by external signs, the internal regard we have for them. It arises from good sense, improved by conversing with good company.”

I would not be beholden to a tyrant, for his acts of tyranny.

A honest man is seldom a vagrant.

I know not what treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason.

The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new.

For it is but usurpation in him to save, as their rightful lord, the lives of men over whom he has no title to reign.

Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any Members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys.

Blessed be they as virtuous, who when they feel their virile members swollen with lust, visit a brothel rather than grind at some husband’s private mill.

Regard not dreams, since they are but the images of our hopes and fears.

The cabbage surpasses all other vegetables. If, at a banquet, you wish to dine a lot and enjoy your dinner, then eat as much cabbage as you wish, seasoned with vinegar, before dinner, and likewise after dinner eat some half-dozen leaves.

Don’t promise twice what you can do at once.

Wise men are more dependent on fools than fools on wise men.

Never travel by sea when you can go by land.

The primary virtue is: hold your tongue; who knows how to keep quiet is close to God.

The Fruits of a Man’s honest Industry are the just Rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal Equity, as is his Title to use them in the Manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above Limitations, every Man is sole Lord and Arbitrer of his own private Actions and Property.

It is remarkable that men, when they differ in what they think considerable, will be apt to differ in almost everything else; their difference begets contradiction; contradiction begets heat; heat quickly rises into resentment, rage, and ill-will; thus they differ in affections, as they differ in judgment.

Should anyone attempt to deceive you by false expressions, and not be a true friend at heart, act in the same manner, and thus art will defeat art. [If you would catch a man let him think he is catching you.]

Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.

Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.

Laziness breeds humors of the blood.

Science is the father of knowledge, but opinion breeds ignorance.

The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed.

Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring.