We make provisions for this life as if it were never to have an end, and for the other life as though it were never to have a beginning.

Physic, for the most part, is nothing else but the substitute of exercise and temperance.

It is the privilege of posterity to set matters right between those antagonists who, by their rivalry for greatness, divided a whole age.

The world is so full of ill-nature that I have lampoons sent me by people who cannot spell, and satires composed by those who scarce know how to write.

Beauty commonly produces love, but cleanliness preserves it. Age itself is not unamiable while it is preserved clean and unsullied; like a piece of metal constantly kept smooth and bright, we look on it with more pleasure than on a new vessel cankered with rust.

The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease.

We see no where the pernicious effects of luxury on a republic more than in that of the ancient Romans, who immediately found itself poor as soon as this vice got footing among them, though they were possessed of all the riches in the world.