The Fashionable World is grown free and easie; our Manners sit more loose upon us: Nothing is so modish as an agreeable Negligence.... In a word, Good Breeding shows it self most, where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I should prefer a Woman that is agreeable in my own Eye, and not deformed in that of the World, to a celebrated Beauty. If you mar...ry one remarkably beautiful, you must have a violent Passion for her, or you have not the proper Taste of her Charms; and if you have such a Passion for her, it is odds but it will be imbittered [sic] with Fears and Jealousies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us in...capable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good Nature, and Evenness of Temper, will give you an easie Companion for Life; Vertue and good Sense, an agreeable Friend; Love a...nd Constancy, a good Wife or Husband. Where we meet one Person with all these Accomplishments, we find an Hundred without any one of them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that... she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is indolence ... indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to t...ake the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is scarcely a young lady in the united kingdoms, who would not rather put up with the misfortune of being sought by a clever..., agreeable man, than have him driven away by the vulgarity of her nearest relations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cow and horse dung, as muck goes, are relatively agreeable. You can even become nostalgic about them. They smell of fermented grai...n, and on the far side of their smell there is hay and grass. Chicken shit is disagreeable and rasps the throat because of the quantity of ammonia. When you are cleaning out the henhouse, you're glad to go to the door and take a deep breath of fresh air. Pig and human excrement, however, smell the worst because men and pigs are carnivorous and their appetites are indiscriminate. The smell includes the sickeningly sweet one of decay. And on the far side of it is death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ... walked to the Abbey of Holyroodhouse once to the Palace itself, once to the crown of Scotland above the gate in front, and o...nce to the venerable old Chapel. I next stood in the court before the Palace, and bowed thrice to Arthur Seat, that lofty romantic mountain on which I have so often strayed in my days of youth and felt the raptures of a soul filled with ideas of the magnificence of God and his creation. Having thus gratified my agreeable whim and superstitious humour, I felt a warm glow of satisfaction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »