Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Ceremony is necessary in Courts, as the outwork and defense of manners.
Seek always for the best words and the happiest expression you can find.
The heart never grows better by age; I fear rather worse; always harder.
Enjoy pleasures, but let them be your own, and then you will taste them.
The scholar without good breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic.
Every man is to be had one way or another and every woman almost anyway.
Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, directs them.
To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.
Since attaining the full use of my reason no one has ever heard me laugh.
Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him.
Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners.
I sometimes give myself admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it.
In friendship, as well as in love, the mind is often the dupe of the heart.
Hear one side and you will be in the dark. Hear both and all will be clear.
Advice is seldom welcome, and those who need it the most, like it the least.
A newspaper should be the maximum of information, and the minimum of comment.
A man who tells nothing, or who tells all, will equally have nothing told him.
Wise people may say what they will, but one passion is never cured by another.
He makes people pleased with him by making them first pleased with themselves.
There never were, since the creation of the world, two cases exactly parallel.
If you open that Pandora's Box you never know what Trojan 'orses will jump out.
The permanency of most friendships depends upon the continuity of good fortune.
If you have an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away?
A man must have a good share of wit himself to endure a great share in another.
Knowledge of the world in only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.
Unlike my subject will I frame my song, It shall be witty and it shan't be long.
Concession comes with better grace and more salutary effect from superior power.
Wrongs are often forgiven; but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever.
The rich are always advising the poor, but the poor seldom return the compliment.
Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.
A wise government knows how to enforce with temper, or to conciliate with dignity.
If we do not plant knowledge when young, it will give us no shade when we are old.
Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.
A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners.
Either a good or a bad reputation outruns and gets before people wherever they go.
No British Government ever will and ever can risk the bones of a British grenadier.
The beasts (Conservatives) had committed suicide to save themselves from slaughter.
Persist and persevere, and you will find most things that are attainable, possible.
A judicious reticence is hard to learn, but it is one of the great lessons of life.
You must embrace the man you hate, if you cannot be justified in knocking him down.
Merit and knowledge will not gain hearts, though they will secure them when gained.
A joker is near akin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least related to wit.
Theoretical principals must sometimes give way for the sake of practical advantages.
The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.
People will no more advance their civility to a bear, than their money to a bankrupt.
Those whom you can make like themselves better will, I promise you, like you very well.
Dispatch is the soul of business, and nothing contributes more to dispatch than method.
I wish... that you had as much pleasure in following my advice, as I have in giving it.