Wit, like hunger, will be with great difficulty restrained from falling on vice and ignorance, where there is great plenty and variety of food.

As it often happens that the best men are but little known, and consequently cannot extend the usefulness of their examples a great way, the biographer is of great utility, as, by communicating such valuable patterns to the world, he may perhaps do a more extensive service to mankind than the person whose life originally afforded the pattern.

Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason

When the effects of female jealousy do not appear openly in their proper colours of rage and fury, we may suspect that mischievous passion to be at work privately, and attempting to undermine, what it doth not attack above-ground.

There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.

The constant desire of pleasing which is the peculiar quality of some, may be called the happiest of all desires in this that it rarely fails of attaining its end when not disgraced by affectation.

Guilt, on the contrary, like a base thief, suspects every eye that beholds him to be privy to his transgressions, and every tongue that mentions his name to be proclaiming them.