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

To take a wife merely as an agreeable and rational companion, will commonly be found to be a grand mistake.

Remember that whatever knowledge you do not solidly lay the foundation of before you are eighteen, you will never be master of while you breathe.

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

The power of applying attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object, is the sure mark of superior genius.

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.

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.