Nature has, herself, I fear, imprinted in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity.

If people must be talking about me, I would have it to be truthfully and justly. I would willingly return from the next world to contradict any person who described me other than I was, although he did it to honour me.

We feel a kind of bittersweet pricking of malicious delight in contemplating the misfortunes of others.

A man should ever, as much as in him lieth, be ready booted to take his journey, and above all things look he have then nothing to do but with himself.

Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.

Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?

It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.