Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

Bread is the staff of life.

The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.

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.