Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.

I cannot imagine why we should be at the expense to furnish wit for succeeding ages, when the former have made no sort of provision for ours.

Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.

I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels, with directions to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called "A Voyage round the world."

All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenue.

Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired

And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.