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

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.

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

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.

The constant desire of pleasing which is the peculiar quality of some, may be called the happiest of all desires in this that it rarely fails of attaining its end when not disgraced by affectation.

When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.

There’s one fool at least in every married couple.

I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.

Enough is equal to a feast.

There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.

There cannot be a move glorious object in creation than a human being replete with benevolence, meditating in what manner he might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to His creatures.

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

If it were given to a man to see virtue’s reward in the next world, he would occupy his intellect, memory and will in nothing but good works, careless of danger or fatigue.

The man of impure speech is a person whose lips are but an opening and a supply pipe which hell uses to vomit its impurities upon the earth.

Ale is meat, drink and cloth; it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.

We can do nothing ourselves; God must do it. To speak to Him thus is easier by nature for woman than for man because a natural desire lives in her to give herself completely to someone.

A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.

Other men’s pains are easily borne.

God exalts the man who humbles himself.