No man divulges his revenue, or at least which way it comes in: but every one publishes his acquisitions.
All passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are but moderate.
Opinion is a powerful party, bold, and without measure.
The most unhappy and frail creatures are men and yet they are the proudest.
Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?
The judgment is an utensil proper for all subjects, and will have an oar in everything.
We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty; but an advantage in judgment we yield to none.
It is much more easy to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other.
We cannot do without it, and yet we disgrace and vilify the same. It may be compared to a cage, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.
Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.
Tis the taste of effeminacy that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.
The general order of things that takes care of fleas and moles also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself.
Tis well for old age that it is always accompanied with want of perception, ignorance, and a facility of being deceived. For should we see how we are used and would not acquiesce, what would become of us?
Pride dwells in the thought; the tongue can have but a very little share in it.
A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children’s affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection.
To honor him whom we have made is far from honoring him that hath made us.
We owe subjection and obedience to all our kings, whether good or bad, alike, for that has respect unto their office; but as to esteem and affection, these are only due to their virtue.
Virtue shuns ease as a companion. It demands a rough and thorny path.
There is the name and the thing; the name is a sound which sets a mark on and denotes the thing. The name is no part of the thing nor of the substance; it is an extraneous piece added to the thing, and outside of it.
I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves, not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance.