110 Quotes by Richard Steele

A lie is troublesome, and sets a man’s invention upon the rack, and one trick needs a great many more to make it good.

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.

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

I look upon it as a Point of Morality, to be obliged by those who endeavour to oblige me.

To be exempt from the Passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing Solitude.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

A true and genuine impudence is ever the effect of ignorance, without the least sense of it.

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.

Tradition is not a fetish to he prayed to— but a useful record of experiences. Time should bring improvement—but not all old things are worthless. We are served by both the moderns and the ancients. The balanced man is he who clings to the best in the old—and appropriates the desirable in the new.