James Burgh Quotes

Deep learning will make you acceptable to the learned; but it is only an obliging and easy behaviour, and entertaining conversation, that will make you agreeable to all companies.

If a favour is asked of you, grant it if you can. If not, refuse it in such a manner as that one denial may be sufficient.

Be sure of the fact before you lose time in searching for a cause.

The beauty of behaviour consists in the manner more than the matter of your discourse.

To offer advice to an angry man, is like blowing against a tempest.

Make your company a rarity, and people will value it. Men despise what they can easily have.

Too much company is worse than none.

If you happen into company where the talk runs into party, obscemty, scandal, folly, or vice of any kind, you had better pass for morose or unsocial, among people whose good opinion is not worth having, than shock your own conscience by joining in conversation which you must disapprove of.

In disputes upon moral or scientific points, ever let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent: so you never shall be at a loss in losing the argument, and gaining a new discovery.

There is no method more likely to cure passion and rashness, than the frequent and attentive consideration of one's own weaknesses: this will work into the mind an habitual sense of the need one has of being pardoned, and will bring down the swelling pride and obstinacy of heart, which are the cause of hasty passion.

If you mean to make your side of the argument appear plausible, do not prejudice the people against what you think truth by your passionate manner of defending it.

Learning is like bank-notes: prudence and good behaviour are like silver, useful upon all occasions.

If you would have a right to account of things from illiterate people, let them tell their story in their own way; if you put them upon talking according to logical rules, you will confound them.

Nothing is more unmannerly than to reflect on any man's profession, sect, or natural infirmity. He who stirs up against himself another's self-love, provokes the strongest passion in human nature.

Wit without humanity degenerates into bitterness. Learning without prudence into pedantry.