It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.
Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.
Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.
The lack of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.
The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age; but that of a good one will not reform it.
He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.
It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.
One principal object of good-breeding is to suit our behaviour to the three several degrees of men, our superiors, our equals, and those below us.
There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them.
Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.
Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery.
Let a man be ne’er so wise, he may be caught with sober lies.
A fig for partridges and quails, ye dainties I know nothing of ye; But on the highest mount in Wales Would choose in peace to drink my coffee.
The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it.
A carpenter is known by his chips.
Though Diogenes lived in a tub, there might be, for aught I know, as much pride under his rags, as in the fine-spun garments of the divine Plato.
The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.
A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.
Orators inflame the people, whose anger is really but a short fit of madness.