A few men are sufficient to broach falsehoods, which are afterwards innocently diffused by successive relaters.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.

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.

There may be other reasons for a man's not speaking in publick than want of resolution: he may have nothing to say.

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction. A man is pleased that his wife is dressed as well as other people, and the wife is pleased that she is dressed.

We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.

He that is pushing his predecessors into the gulf of obscurity, cannot but sometimes suspect, that he must himself sink in like manner, and, as he stands upon the same precipice, be swept away with the same violence.