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.

Vision is seeing the invisible.

Dignity, high station, or great riches, are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

Love of flattery, in most men, proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; in women, from the contrary.

It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.