If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.

When you have found out the prevailing passion of any man, remember never to trust him where that passion is concerned.

Were you to converse with a king, you ought to be as easy and unembarrassed as with your own valet-de chambre; but yet every look,word, and action should imply the utmost respect.... You must wait till you are spoken to; you must receive, not give, the subject of conversation, and you must even take care that the given subject of such conversation do not lead you into any impropriety.

If you have an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away?

Observe any meetings of people, and you will always find their eagerness and impetuosity rise or fall in proportion to their numbers.

Anne of Austria (with great submission to a Crowned Head do I say it) was a B----. She had spirit and courage without parts, devotion without common morality, and lewdness without tenderness either to justify or to dignify it. Her two sons were no more Lewis the Thirteen's than they were mine.

Business by no means forbids pleasures; on the contrary, they reciprocally season each other; and I will venture to affirm, that no man enjoys either in perfection that does not join both.