Merit and knowledge will not gain hearts, though they will secure them when gained.

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

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.

The difference between a man of sense and a fop is that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time he knows he must not neglect it.

Men are much more unwilling to have their weaknesses and their imperfections known than their crimes.

If you will please people, you must please them in their own way; and as you cannot make them what they should be, you must take them as they are.

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