The liberty of using harmless pleasure will not be disputed; but it is still to be examined what pleasures are harmless.

Excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.

Wit will never make a man rich, but there are places where riches will always make a wit.

Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists.

We may have many acquaintances, but we can have but few friends; this made Aristotle say that he that hath many friends hath none.

Waste cannot be accurately told, though we are sensible how destructive it is. Economy, on the one hand, by which a certain income is made to maintain a man genteelly; and waste, on the other, by which on the same income another man lives shabbily, cannot be defined. It is a very nice thing; as one man wears his coat out much sooner than another, we cannot tell how.

Tears are often to be found where there is little sorrow, and the deepest sorrow without any tears.