The general remedy of those who are uneasy without knowing the cause is change of place.

To keep your secret is wisdom; but to expect others to keep it is folly.

No wise man will go to live in the country, unless he has something to do which can be better done in the country. For instance, if he is to shut himself up for a year to study science, it is better to look out to the fields, than to an opposite wall. Then, if a man walks out in the country, there is nobody to keep him from walking in again: but if a man walks out in London, he is not sure when he will walk in again. A great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life.

If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.

Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained

Difference of thoughts will produce difference of language. He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of a larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies?

Courtesy and good-humour are often found with little real worth.