Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

War: that mad game the world so loves to play.

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.

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.