Wise people may say what they will, but one passion is never cured by another.

Good breeding and good nature do incline us rather to help and raise people up to ourselves, than to mortify and depress them, and, in truth, our own private interest concurs in it, as it is making ourselves so many friends, instead of so many enemies.

We are hardly ever grateful for a fine clock or watch when it goes right, and we pay attention to it only when it falters, for then we are caught by surprise. It ought to be the other way about.

To take a wife merely as an agreeable and rational companion, will commonly be found to be a grand mistake.

It is commonly said that ridicule is the best test of truth; for that it will not stick where it is not just. I deny it. A truth learned in a certain light, and attacked in certain words, by men of wit and humor, may, and often doth, become ridiculous, at least so far, that the truth is only remembered and repeated for the sake of the ridicule.

Real friendship is a slow grower.

If originally it was not good for a man to be alone, it is much worse for a sick man to be so; he thinks too much of his distemper, and magnifies it.