To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.
To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.
I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.
It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.
No young man ever thinks he shall die.
Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.
One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.
To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.
Those who are pleased with the fewest things know the least, as those who are pleased with everything know nothing.
The silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery. His not daring to say anything in our behalf implies a tacit censure.
But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen.
An accomplished coquette excites the passions of others, in proportion as she feels none herself.
The soul of dispatch is decision.
Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite.
A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.
Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.
A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer – that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
Most of the methods for measuring the lapse of time have, I believe, been the contrivance of monks and religious recluses, who, finding time hang heavy on their hands, were at some pains to see how they got rid of it.