An age that melts in unperceiv'd decay, And glides in modest innocence away.

Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.

You cannot give me an instance of any man who is permitted to lay out his own time contriving not to have tedious hours.

There is no observation more frequently made by such as employ themselves in surveying the conduct of mankind, than that marriage, though the dictate of nature, and the institution of Providence, is yet very often the cause of misery, and that those who enter into that state can seldom forbear to express their repentance, and their envy of those whom either chance or caution hath withheld from it.

No estimate is more in danger of erroneous calculations than those by which a man computes the force of his own genius.

There is no book so poor that it would not be a prodigy if wholly made by a single man.

No man tells his opinion so freely as when he imagines it received with implicit veneration.