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

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.

Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate inquiry whether it is right.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

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.