Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners; without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.

Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.

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

Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.

Your onions should be thoroughly boiled.

I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.