If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.

Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.

Live every day as your last, because one of these days, it will be.

In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.

Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any.

By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.

I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels, with directions to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called "A Voyage round the world."