Health ... is the first and greatest of all blessings.

The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion.

Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different.

Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.

Take the tone of the company you are in...

Every man becomes, to a certain degree, what the people he generally converses with are.

At any age we must cherish illusions, consolatory or merely pleasant; in youth, they are omnipresent; in old age we must search for them, or even invent them. But with all that, boredom is their natural and inevitable accompaniment.