“Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse.”

Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other.

Girls like to be played with, and rumpled a little too, sometimes.

Be not affronted at a joke. If one throw salt at thee, thou wilt receive no harm, unless thou art raw.

When lovely woman stoops to folly, and finds too late that men betray, what charm can soothe her melancholy, what art can wash her guilt away?

Ceremonies are different in every country, but true politeness is everywhere the same.

Where wealth accumulates, men decay.

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.

The jests of the rich are ever successful.

I was ever of the opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population.

You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.

Surely the best way to meet the enemy is head on in the field and not wait till they plunder our very homes.

A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation; therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future.

People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy.

Man wants but little here below, nor wants that little long.

A honest man is seldom a vagrant.

Besides, switchboard girls and secretaries have become very good. They’ve learned to take you apart. ‘Who? Why? What for? What company?’ You don’t always get by. I seldom call on the phone. I’d rather go.

Whether this happens because they stay so long and attend their work so diligently that they forget the faces and persons, which they first sat down with, or whatever it is, they seldom rise from the toilet the same woman they appeared when they began to dress

The minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.

Books are not seldom talismans and spells.

The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow.

We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.

First one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement.