A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body; it preserves constant ease and serenity within us; and more than countervails all the calamities and afflictions which can befall us from without.

Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.

Pedantry in learning is like hypocrisy inn religion--a form of knowledge without the power of it.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

Better to die ten thousand deaths, Than wound my honour.

Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.

I never knew a critic who made it his business to lash the faults of other writers that was not guilty of greater himself--as the hangman is generally a worse malefactor than the criminal that suffers by his hand.