Can anything be imagined so ridiculous that this miserable and wretched creature, who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?

My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.

Obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in, and best becoming, a mean and illiterate soul.

It is much more easy to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other.

No man divulges his revenue, or at least which way it comes in: but every one publishes his acquisitions.

And I loathe people who find it harder to put up with a gown askew than with a soul askew and who judge a man by his bow, his bearing and his boots.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.