Riches are of no value in themselves; their use is discovered only in that which they procure.

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

Every man has frequent grievances which only the solicitude of friendship will discover and remedy, and which would remain for ever unheeded in the mighty heap of human calamity, were it only surveyed by the eye of general benevolence equally attentive to every misery.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.

Adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is most beneficial to us.