Everyone desires long life, not one old age.
I used to wonder how a man of birth and spirit could endure to be wholly insignificant and obscure in a foreign country, when he might live with lustre in his own.
The chameleon, who is said to feed upon nothing but air, has of all animals the nimblest tongue.
Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.
There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.
We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.
Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.
Brisk talkers are usually slow thinkers. There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. If you are civil to the voluble they will abuse your patience; if brusque, your character.
Brisk talkers are generally slow thinkers.
Have you not observed that there is a lower kind of discretion and regularity, which seldom fails of raising men to the highest station in the court, the church, and the law?
It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding.
Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.