It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.
It is better to live rich than to die rich.
No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.
Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.
A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.
He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.
He who praises everybody, praises nobody.
The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.
What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.
A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.
All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.
Bounty always receives part of its value from the manner in which it is bestowed.
Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.
The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.
All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.
There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.