Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
So, naturalists observe, a flea; Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite ’em, And so proceed ad infinitum.
Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.
By the laws of God, of nature, of nations, and of your country you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England.
In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.
Wise people are never less alone than when they are alone.
An idle reason lessens the weight of the good ones you gave before.
Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.
Books, like men their authors, have no more than one wayofcoming intothe world, but there areten thousand to go out of it, and return no more.
The worthiest people are the most injured by slander, as is the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at.
A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans.
Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.
I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
Conversation is but carving! Give no more to every guest Than he’s able to digest.
I am of the level with common Astrologers; who, with an old paltry cant, and a few pot-hooks for planets to amuse the vulgar, have too long been suffered to abuse the world.
A college joke to cure the dumps.
I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric.
Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any.