Don't set your wit against a child.

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.

In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire.

Men who possess all the advantages of life are in a state where there are many accidents to disorder and discompose, but few to please them.

It is not so much the being exempt from faults as the having overcome them that is an advantage to us; it being with the follies of the mind as with weeds of a field, which if destroyed and consumed upon the place where they grow, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung there.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

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