There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.

Books, the children of the brain.

How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice when they will not so much as take warning.

There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity; nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.

It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.

This single Stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected Corner, I once knew in a flourishing State in a Forest: It was full of Sap, full of Leaves, and full of Boughs: But now, in vain does the busy Art of Man pretend to vie with Nature, by tying that withered Bundle of Twigs to its sapless Trunk: It is at best but the Reverse of what it was; a Tree turned upside down, the Branches on the Earth, and the Root in the Air.

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.