The Stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
Physicians ought not to give their judgment of religion, for the same reason that butchers are not admitted to be jurors upon life and death.
The reason why so few marriages are happy, is, because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.
If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
Nothing more unqualifies a man to act with prudence than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt.
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.
Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their own strength. It is, in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
Satire is reckoned the easiest of all wit, but I take it to be otherwise in very bad times: for it is as hard to satirise well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues. It is easy enough to do either to people of moderate characters.