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

A lie is an excuse guarded

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

The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.

Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.

Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.

No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.