Horner: Nay, madam, rather than they shall prejudice your honour, I’ll prejudice theirs; and, to serve you, I’ll lie with ‘em all, make the secret their own, and then they’ll keep it. I am a Machiavel in love, madam.

Lady Fidget: Oh, no, sir, not that way.

Horner: Nay, the devil take me, if censorious women are to be silenced any other way.

For, impartially speaking, the French are as much better critics than the English, as they are worse poets. Thus we generally allow that they better understand the management of a war than our islanders; but we know we are superior to them in the day of battle. They value themselves on their generals, we on our soldiers. But this is not the proper place to decide that question, if they make it one.

Horner: Doctor, there are quacks in love as well as physic, who get but the fewer and worse patients for their boasting; a good name is seldom got by giving it one’s self; and women, no more than honour, are compassed by bragging. Come, come, Doctor, the wisest lawyer never discovers the merits of his cause till the trial; the wealthiest man conceals his riches, and the cunning gamester his play. Shy huspands and keepers, like old rooks, are not to be cheated by a new unpractised trick: false friendship will pass now no more than false dice upon ‘em; no, not in the city.

This particular pool of light moving in a mesmeric manner backwards and forwards picked out from time to time a long red island of spilt wine. It seemed to leap forward from the mottled cloth when the light fastened upon it in startling contrast to the chiaroscuro and to defy the laws of tone.

Never less solitary than when he was alone, never more busy than when he seemed most idle.

Varium et mutabile semper femina is the sharpest satire, in the fewest words, that ever was made on womankind; for both the adjectives are neuter, and animal must be understood, to make them grammar. Virgil does well to put those words into the mouth of Mercury. If a god had not spoken them, neither durst he have written them, nor I translated them.

We are naturally displeas’d with an unknown critic, because we are bitten in the dark, and know not where to fasten our revenge.

The man’s voracious vanity devoured this implied tribute to his local and critical supremacy, with an appearance of the highest relish.

It appeared to me, on looking over the tradesmen’s books, as if we might have kept the basement story paved with butter, such was the extensive scale of our consumption of that article. I don’t know whether the Excise returns of the period may have exhibited any increase in the demand for pepper; but if our performances did not affect the market, I should say several families must have left off using it. And the most wonderful fact of all was, that we never had anything in the house.

The best men are not consistent in good – why should the worst men be consistent in evil?