Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.

I must complain the cards are ill shuffled till I have a good hand.

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.

Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.

No man will take counsel, but every man will take money. Therefore, money is better than counsel.

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

Though Diogenes lived in a tub, there might be, for aught I know, as much pride under his rags, as in the fine-spun garments of the divine Plato.