Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
Then, rising with Aurora’s light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write; Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.
You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday.
Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.
There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.
Just get the right syllable in the proper place.
We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.
He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver’s watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.
The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora’s box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.
Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
Who can deny that all men are violent lovers of the truth, when we see them so positive in their errors, which they will maintain out of their zeal for truth, although they contradict themselves every day of their lives.
No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.