''I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience—it also marks the time, which is four o'clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.''
''He is the very pineapple of politeness!''
''The Right Honourable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.''
''Sure if I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs.''
'''Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion.''
''Take care; you know I am compliance itself, when I am not thwarted! No one more easily led, when I have my own way; but don't put me in a phrenzy.''
''When delicate and feeling souls are separated, there is not a feature in the sky, not a movement of the elements, not an aspiration of the breeze, but hints some cause for a lover's apprehension.''
''Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.''
''Ay, ay, the best terms will grow obsolete: damns have had their day.''
''There is nothing on earth so easy as to forget, if a person chooses to set about it. I'm sure I have as much forgot your poor, dear uncle, as if he had never existed; and I thought it my duty to do so.''
''An unforgiving eye, and a damned disinheriting countenance!''
''My valour is certainly going, it is sneaking off! I feel it oozing out as it were, at the palms of my hands!''
''Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.... There is nothing on earth so easy as to forget, if a person chooses to set about it. I'm sure I have as much forgot your poor, dear uncle, as if he had never existed—and I thought it my duty to do so.''
''Modesty is a quality in a lover more praised by the women than liked.''
''For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse—why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!''
''Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge; it blossoms through the year. And depend on it ... that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last.''
