Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.
It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.
They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.
Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
I love good creditable acquaintance; I love to be the worst of the company.
Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.
Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
Come, agree, the law’s costly.
She ’s no chicken; she ’s on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
I’ve often wish’d that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year; A handsome house to lodge a friend; A river at my garden’s end; A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land set out to plant a wood.
But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.
It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.
For want of a block, man will stumble at a straw.
If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms...
In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man uncapable of holding any public station; for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence.
I row after health like a waterman...