It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

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

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.

Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.

Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.