Whoever rises above those who once pleased themselves with equality, will have many malevolent gazers at his eminence.

What is the reason that women servants ... have much lower wages than men servants ... when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male?

Providence has fixed the limits of human enjoyment by immovable boundaries, and has set different gratifications at such a distance from each other, that no art or power can bring them together. This great law it is the business of every rational being to understand, that life may not pass away in an attempt to make contradictions consistent, to combine opposite qualities, and to unite things which the nature of their being must always keep asunder.

When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

It may be laid down as a position which seldom deceives, that when a man cannot bear his own company, there is something wrong.

Levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.