To have gold is to be in fear, and to want it to be sorrow.
Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.
I never take a nap after dinner but when I have had a bad night, and then the nap takes me.
I never have sought the world; the world was not to seek me.
Parents and children seldom act in concert: each child endeavors to appropriate the esteem or fondness of the parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation, betray each other to their children.
He that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly become corrupt.
We may have many acquaintances, but we can have but few friends; this made Aristotle say that he that hath many friends hath none.
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
Pension: An allowance made to anyone without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.
Such is the constitution of man that labour may be styled its own reward; nor will any external incitements be requisite, if it be considered how much happiness is gained, and how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the body.
Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.
Few things are so liberally bestowed, or squandered with so little effect, as good advice.
Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.
There are few so free from vanity as not to dictate to those who will hear their instructions with a visible sense of their own beneficence.
No man tells his opinion so freely as when he imagines it received with implicit veneration.
Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.
Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained.
Stand Firm for your country, and become a man Honour’d and lov’d: It were a noble life, To be found dead, embracing her.
There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur; so many immediate evils are.
He that never thinks can never be wise.