No man tastes pleasures truly, who does not earn them by previous business; and few people do business well, who do nothing else.

The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion.

Artichoke: That vegetable of which one has more at the finish than at the start of dinner.

Endeavor, as much as you can, to keep company with people above you.... Do not mistake, when I say company above you, and think that I mean with regard to their birth; that is the least consideration; but I mean with regard to their merit, and the light in which the world considers them.

I am in the pitiable situation of feeling all the force of temptation without having the strength to succumb to it.

A foreign minister, I will maintain it, can never be a good man of business if he is not an agreeable man of pleasure too. Half his business is done by the help of his pleasures: his views are carried on, and perhaps best, and most unsuspectedly, at balls, suppers, assemblies, and parties of pleasure; by intrigues with women, and connections insensibly formed with men, at those unguarded hours of amusement.

Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different.