“Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.”
“I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”
“Faith! he must make his stories shorter or change his comrades once a quarter.”
“Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.”
“The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.”
“I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.”
“What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.”
“The lack of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.”
“As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.”
“But nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches, as to conceive how others can be in want.”
“Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.”
“It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.”
“The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance and never to keep his work.”
“If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.”
“It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.”
“Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.”
“As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.”
“Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.”
“Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as in books it is generally the worst sort of reading.”
“One of the very best rules of conversation is to never, say anything which any of the company wish had been left unsaid.”
“Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.”
“When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
“The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.”
“Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.”
“A footman may swear; but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgment?”
“In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.”
“It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.”
“O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.”
“Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.”
“Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.”