An honest man may really love a pretty girl, but only an idiot marries her merely because she is pretty.

No man can possibly improve in any company for which he has not respect enough to be under some degree of restraint.

Honest error is to be pitied not ridiculed.

Let them show me a cottage where there are not the same vices of which they accuse the courts.

I could wish there were a treaty made between the French and the English theatres, in which both parties should make considerableconcessions. The English ought to give up their notorious violations of the unities, and all their massacres, racks, dead bodies, and mangled carcasses, which they so frequently exhibit upon their stage. The French should engage to have more action, and less declamation, and not to cram and to crowd things together to almost a degree of impossibility from a too scrupulous adherence to the unities.

The greatest dangers have their allurements, if the want of success is likely to be attended with a degree of glory. Middling dangers are horrid, when the loss of reputation is the inevitable consequence of ill success.

A joker is near akin to a buffoon; and neither of them is the least related to wit.