Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.

By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.

Dignity, high station, or great riches, are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.

For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.

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.

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.