To acknowledge you were wrong yesterday is simply to let the world know that you are wiser today than you were then.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

Perpetual aiming at wit is a very bad part of conversation. It is done to support a character: it generally fails; it is a sort of insult on the company, and a restraint upon the speaker.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.

Rhetoric in serious discourses is like the flowers in corn; pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap profit from it.