Great Throughts Treasury

"Charity and good-nature give a sanction to the most common actions; and pride and ill-nature make our best virtues despicable."

"A good name is seldom got by giving it oneself."

"A mistress should be like a little country retreat near the town, not to dwell in constantly, but only for a night and away."

"As wit is too hard for power in council, so power is too hard for wit in action."

"Bluster, sputter, question, cavil; but be sure your argument be intricate enough to confound the court."

"Ceremony and great professing renders friendships as much suspected as it does religion."

"Come, for my part I will have only those glorious, manly pleasures of being very drunk, and very slovenly."

"Conversation augments pleasure and diminishes pain by our having shares in either; for silent woes are greatest, as silent satisfaction leas; since sometimes our pleasure would be none but for telling of it, and our grief insupportable but for participation."

"Go to your business, pleasure, whilst I go to my pleasure, business."

"Good fellowship and friendship are lasting, rational and manly pleasures."

"A beauty masked, like the sun in eclipse, gathers together more gazers than if it shined out."

"Grief is so far from retrieving a loss that it makes it greater; but the way to lessen it is by a comparison with others' losses."

"He's a fool that marries, but he's a greater that does not marry a fool; what is wit in a wife good for, but to make a man a cuckold?"

"Hunger, revenge, to sleep are petty foes, But only death the jealous eyes can close."

"I have heard people eat most heartily of another man's meat, that is, what they do not pay for."

"I weigh the man, not his title: 'tis not the king's inscription can make the metal better or heavier."

"I weigh the man, not his title; 't is not the king's stamp can make the metal better."

"Marrying to increase love is like gaming to become rich; alas, you only lose what little stock you had before."

"Mistresses are like books; if you pore upon them too much, they doze you and make you unfit for company; but if used discreetly, you are the fitter for conversation by em."

"Money makes up in a measure all other wants in men."

"Necessity, mother of invention."

"Next to the pleasure of finding a new mistress is that of being rid of an old one."

"Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate."

"Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other."

"Temperance is the nurse of chastity."

"Thy books should, like thy friends, not many be, yet such wherein men may thy judgment see."

"Tis my maxim, he's a fool that marries; but he's a greater that does not marry a fool."

"Wit has as few true judges as painting."

"Wit is more necessary than beauty; and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it."

"With faint praises one another damn."

"Women of quality are so civil, you can hardly distinguish love from good breeding."

"Women serve but to keep a man from better company."

"Your women of honor, as you call em, are only chary of their reputations, not their persons; and 'Tis scandal that they would avoid, not men."

"You are of the society of the wits and railleurs . . . the surest sign is, since you are an enemy to marriage,--for that, I hear, you hate as much as business or bad wine."