To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.
Courage is the thing. All goes if courage goes.
We are growing serious, and, let me tell you, that’s the very next step to being dull.
Antidotes are what you take to prevent dotes.
Artificial intelligence will never be a match for natural stupidity.
Good nature is more agreeable in conversation than wit and gives a certain air to the countenance which is more amiable than beauty.
My voice is still for war.
From hence, let fierce contending nations know, what dire effects from civil discord flow.
It is the privilege of posterity to set matters right between those antagonists who, by their rivalry for greatness, divided a whole age.
But silence never shows itself to so great an advantage, as when it is made the reply to calumny and defamation, provided that we give no just occasion for them.
A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body; it preserves constant ease and serenity within us; and more than countervails all the calamities and afflictions which can befall us from without.
There is nothing that more betrays a base ungenerous spirit than the giving of secret stabs to a man’s reputation. Lampoons and satires that are written with wit and spirit are like poisoned darts, which not only inflict a wound, but make it incurable.
He only is a great man who can neglect the applause of the multitude and enjoy himself independent of its favor.
There is no defense against reproach, but obscurity; it is a kind of concomitant to greatness.
To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.
When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations.
I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: ‘What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.’
Justice is an unassailable fortress, built on the brow of a mountain which cannot be overthrown by the violence of torrents, nor demolished by the force of armies.
Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.
In private conversation between intimate friends, the wisest men very often talk like the weakest : for indeed the talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.