Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.

A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.

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

Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects,--frequent repetition and being soon exhausted; so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.

"Lawyers Are": Those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding the law.

There seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands than that of discerning when to have done.

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.