What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.

May you live all the days of your life.

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

Argument is the worst sort of conversation.

The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age; but that of a good one will not reform it.

Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.