Un homme qui rit, said the duke, ne sera jamais dangereux. - Laurence Sterne

ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying? — Nothing.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! - take them out of this book, for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them

It is by the finest tints, and most insensible gradations, that nature descends from the fairest face about St. James’s, to the sootiest complexion in Africa: at which tint of these, is it, that the ties of blood are to cease? and how many shades must we descend lower still in the scale, ’ere mercy is to vanish with them? — but ’tis no uncommon thing, my good Sancho, for one half of the world to use the other half of it like brutes, & then endeavor to make ’em so.

(Excerpt from letter to Ignatius Sancho)