Fashion is a great restraint upon your persons of taste and fancy; who would otherwise in the most trifling instances be able to distinguish themselves from the vulgar.

In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem.

Amid the most mercenary ages it is but a secondary sort of admiration that is bestowed upon magnificence.

Learning, like money, may be of so base a coin as to be utterly void of use.

When self-interest inclines a man to print, he should consider that the purchaser expects a pennyworth for his penny, and has reason to asperse his honesty if he finds himself deceived.

A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood.

The fund of sensible discourse is limited; that of jest and badinerie is infinite.