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

If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.

It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns, one procrastinates, one can do it when one will, and therefore one seldom does it at all.

Talk often, but never long; in that case, if you do not please, at least you are sure not to tire your hearers. Pay your own reckoning, but do not treat the whole company; this being one of the few cases in which people do not care to be treated, every one being fully convinced that he has wherewithal to pay.

When one is at play, one should not think of one's learning.

Without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all.

Many people come into company full of what they intend to say in it themselves, without the least regard to others; and thus charged up to the muzzle are resolved to let it off at any rate.