Stolen sweets are best.

The line expresses a familiar moral-psychological idea: pleasures gained illicitly can feel more intense precisely because they are forbidden, risky, or transgressive. “Sweets” stands for any tempting delight; “stolen” signals both secrecy and the thrill of breaking rules. Read straight, it is a cynical celebration of wrongdoing; read more broadly, it can be taken as an observation about desire—how prohibition and scarcity can heighten appetite and make ordinary pleasures seem extraordinary. In a dramatic context (as Cibber often wrote), such a maxim can also function ironically, exposing a character’s rationalization of vice rather than endorsing it.