Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.

Honest error is to be pitied not ridiculed.

A rake is a composition of all the lowest, most ignoble, degrading, and shameful vices; they all conspire to disgrace his character, and to ruin his fortune; while wine and the pox content which shall soonest and most effectually destroy his constitution.

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

In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice; because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge.

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.

Let them show me a cottage where there are not the same vices of which they accuse the courts.