Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The best way to compel weak-minded people to adopt our opinion, is to frighten them from all others, by magnifying their danger.
No man tastes pleasures truly, who does not earn them by previous business; and few people do business well, who do nothing else.
The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it.
May you live as long as you are fit to live, but no longer, or, may you rather die before you cease to be fit to live than after!
If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.
Let it be your maxim through life, to know all you can know, yourself; and never to trust implicitly to the information of others.
An ignorant man is insignificant and contemptible; nobody cares for his company, and he can just be said to live, and that is all.
It is often more necessary to conceal contempt than resentment; the former is never forgiven, but the later is sometimes forgotten.
Awkwardness is a more real disadvantage than it is generally thought to be; it often occasions ridicule, it always lessens dignity.
The manner of your speaking is full as important as the matter, as more people have ears to be tickled than understandings to judge.
The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion.
A cheerful, easy, open countenance will make fools think you a good-natured man, and make designing men think you an undesigning one.
Observe any meetings of people, and you will always find their eagerness and impetuosity rise or fall in proportion to their numbers.
Whenever I go to an opera, I leave my sense and reason at the door with my half-guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and my ears.
Sexual intercourse is a grossly overrated pastime; the position is undignified, the pleasure momentary and the consequences damnable.
Most people have ears, but few have judgment; tickle those ears, and depend upon it, you will catch their judgments, such as they are.
The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, friendships, require a degree of good-breeding both to preserve and cement them.
A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.
When griefs are genuine, I find, there is nothing more vacuous, more burdensome, or even more impertinent, than letters of consolation.
It is good breeding alone that can prepossess people in your favor at first sight, more time being necessary to discover greater talents.
Arbitrary power has seldom... been introduced in any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step.
There is nothing that people bear more impatiently, or forgive less, than contempt: and an injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.
Smooth your way to the head through the heart. The way of reason is a good one: but it is commonly something longer, and perhapsnot so sure.
All I desire for my own burial, is not to be buried alive; but how or where, I think, must be entirely indifferent to every rational creature.
Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.
Letters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them just what we should say to the persons if we were with them.
Women are much more like each other than men: they have, in truth, but two passions, vanity and love; these are their universal characteristics.
To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure which I have made in life.
Remember that whatever knowledge you do not solidly lay the foundation of before you are eighteen, you will never be master of while you breathe.
Remember, as long as you live, that nothing but strict truth can carry you through the world, with either your conscience or your honor unwounded.
If you will please people, you must please them in their own way; and as you cannot make them what they should be, you must take them as they are.
Experience only can teach men not to prefer what strikes them for the present moment, to what will have much greater weight with the them hereafter.
As fathers commonly go, it is seldom a misfortune to be fatherless; and considering the general run of sons, as seldom a misfortune to be childless.
In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice; because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge.
If originally it was not good for a man to be alone, it is much worse for a sick man to be so; he thinks too much of his distemper, and magnifies it.
Assurance and intrepidity, under the white banner of seeming modesty, clear the way for merit, that would otherwise be discouraged by difficulties...
So much are our minds influenced by the accidents of our bodies, that every man is more the man of the day than a regular and consequential character.
Few fathers care much for their sons, or at least, most of them care more for their money. Of those who really love their sons, few know how to do it.
Remember that the wit, humour, and jokes of most mixed companies are local. They thrive in that particular soil, but will not often bear transplanting.
Many new years you may see, but happy ones you cannot see without deserving them. These virtue, honor, and knowledge alone can merit, alone can produce.
It must be owned, that the Graces do not seem to be natives of Great Britain; and I doubt, the best of us here have more of rough than polished diamond.
Second-rate knowledge, and middling talents, carry a man farther at courts, and in the busy part of the world, than superior knowledge and shining parts.
Gold and silver are but merchandise, as well as cloth or linen; and that nation that buys the least, and sells the most, must always have the most money.
Nothing sharpens the arrow of sarcasm so keenly as the courtesy that polishes it; no reproach is like that we clothe with a smile and present with a bow.
Never hold anyone by the button or the hand in order to be heard out; for if people are unwilling to hear you, you had better hold your tongue than them.
I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.
A man's fortune is frequently decided by his first address. If pleasing, others at once conclude he has merit; but if ungraceful, they decide against him.
I find, by experience, that the mind and the body are more than married, for they are most intimately united; and when one suffers, the other sympathizes.
There are some occasions in which a man must tell half his secret, in order to conceal the rest: but there is seldom one in which a man should tell it all.