The finest landscape in the world is improved by a good inn in the foreground.
Women can spin very well, but they cannot write a good book of cookery.
Among the calamities of war may be numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.
It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.
The truly strong and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.
There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful.
Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.
I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.
It is not often that any man can have so much knowledge of another, as is necessary to make instruction useful.
A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.
This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.
Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim; and when you are calculating, calculate.
Every man is of importance to himself.
Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favor.
All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.
The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.
Assertion is not argument; to contradict the statement of an opponent is not proof that you are correct.
A merchant may, perhaps, be a man of an enlarged mind, but there is nothing in trade connected with an enlarged mind.
Marriage is the best state for man in general, and every man is a worst man in proportion to the level he is unfit for marriage.
Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life; and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre.