I have often lamented that we cannot close our ears with as much ease as we can our eyes.

The person whom you favoured with a loan, if he be a good man, will think himself in your debt after he has paid you.

Since our persons are not of our own making, when they are such as appear defective or uncomely, it is, methinks, an honest and laudable fortitude to dare to be ugly.

It is a secret known but to few, yet of no small use in the conduct of life, that when you fall into a man's conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.

It is an impertinent and unreasonable fault in conversation for one man to take up all the discourse.

It is a wonderful thing that so many, and they not reckoned absurd, shall entertain those with whom they converse by giving them the history of their pains and aches and imagine such narrations their quota of conversation.

The world is grown so full of dissimulation and compliment, that men's words are hardly any signification of their thoughts.

Mutual good humour is a dress we ought to appear in wherever we meet, and we should make no mention of what concerns our selves, without it be of matters wherein our friends ought to rejoice.

Since we cannot promise our selves constant health, let us endeavour at such temper as may be our best support in the decay of it.

No woman is capable of being beautiful who is not incapable of being false.