“Wisdom is the talent of buying virtuous pleasures at the cheapest rate.”

There is nothing so useful to man in general, nor so beneficial to particular societies and individuals, as trade. This is that alma mater, at whose plentiful breast all mankind are nourished.

Success is a fruit of slow growth.

Now in reality, the world has paid too great a compliment to critics, and has imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

A beau is everything of a woman but the sex, and nothing of a man beside it.

Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it, a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.

Never trust the man who has reason to suspect that you know he hath injured you.

What is commonly called love, namely the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human flesh.

LOVE: A word properly applied to our delight in particular kinds of food; sometimes metaphorically spoken of the favorite objects of all our appetites.

The highest friendship must always lead us to the highest pleasure.

The greatest part of mankind labor under one delirium or another; and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in madness, but the species of it. The covetous, the prodigal, the superstitious, the libertine, and the coffee-house politician, are all Quixotes in their several ways.

A man may go to heaven with half the pains it cost him to purchase hell.

No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress.

We must eat to live, and not live to eat.

A wonder lasts but nine days, and then the puppy’s eyes are open.

The prudence of the best heads is often defeated by tenderness of the best hearts.

The life of a coquette is one constant lie; and the only rule by which you can form any correct judgment of them is that they are never what they seem.