My heavens! I've been talking prose for the last forty years without knowing it.

Reasoning is the pastime of my whole household, and all this reasoning has driven out Reason.

It is a fine seasoning for joy to think of those we love.

I prefer a pleasant vice to an annoying virtue.

The most effective way of attacking vice is to expose it to public ridicule. People can put up with rebukes but they cannot bear being laughed at: they are prepared to be wicked but they dislike appearing ridiculous.

We live under a prince who is an enemy to fraud, a prince whose eyes penetrate into the heart, and whom all the art of impostors can't deceive.

Deference and intimacy live far apart.