I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds.

Making verses is almost as common as taking snuff, and God can tell what miserable stuff people carry about in their pockets, and offer to all their acquaintances, and you know one cannot refuse reading and taking a pinch.

The use of knowledge in our sex (beside the amusement of solitude) is to moderate the passions and learn to be contented with a small expense, which are the certain effects of a studious life and, it may be, preferable even to that fame which men have engrossed to themselves and will not suffer us to share.

Gardening is certainly the next amusement to reading.

I know a love may be revived which absence, inconstancy, or even infidelity has extinguished, but there is no returning from a dTgovt given by satiety.

People wish their enemies dead - but I do not; I say give them the gout, give them the stone!

Copiousness of words, however ranged, is always false eloquence, though it will ever impose on some sort of understandings.