When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

For want of a block, man will stumble at a straw.

Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.

Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus; that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live.

Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

There is no talent so useful toward rising in the world, or which puts men more out of the reach of fortune, than that quality generally possessed by the dullest sort of men, and in common speech called discretion; a species of lower prudence, by the assistance of which, people of the meanest intellectuals, without any other qualification, pass through the world in great tranquillity, and with universal good treatment, neither giving nor taking offence.

Daphne knows, with equal ease, How to vex and how to please; But the folly of her sex Makes her sole delight to vex.