The worthiest people are the most injured by slander, as is the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.

Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.

Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

When a real genius appeares in this world, you'll know him by the fact that all the fools have allied against him.

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.