Books, the children of the brain.

What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.

"Lawyers Are": Those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding the law.

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.

Love of flattery, in most men, proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; in women, from the contrary.

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

Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them; as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.