Patience alleviates, as impatience augments, pain; thus persons of strong will suffer less than those who give way to irritation.

Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery.

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."

It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

She 's no chicken; she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.