To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure which I have made in life.

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.

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

A learned parson, rusting in his cell at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well upon the nature of man; will profoundly analyze the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the senses, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what ; and yet, unfortunately, he knows nothing of man... He views man as he does colours in Sir Isaac Newton's prism, where only the capital ones are seen; but an experienced dyer knows all their various shades and gradations, together with the result of their several mixtures.

Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well.

Women who are either indisputably beautiful, or indisputably ugly, are best flattered upon the score of their understandings.

Few fathers care much for their sons, or at least, most of them care more for their money. Of those who really love their sons, few know how to do it.