The Triumph of Wit is to make your good Nature subdue your Censure; to be quick in seeing Faults, and slow in exposing them. You are to consider, that the invisible thing called a Good Name, is made up of the Breath of Numbers that speak well of you; so that if by a disobliging Word you silence the meanest, the Gale will be less strong which is to bear up your Esteem.

A man that steps aside from the world and has leisure to observe it without interest and design, thinks all mankind as mad as they think him.

Business is so much lower a thing than learning that a man used to the last cannot easily bring his stomach down to the first.

Formality is sufficiently revenged upon the world for being so unreasonably laughed at; it is destroyed, it is true, but it hath the spiteful satisfaction of seeing everything destroyed with it.

Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is very good company by the way.

A person may dwell so long upon a thought that it may take him a prisoner.

I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.