Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all.

Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding; and those who are conscious of their inferiority have the modesty not to talk; when they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous; but he is not improved; he is only not sensible of his defects.

Whoever rises above those who once pleased themselves with equality, will have many malevolent gazers at his eminence.

The great end of prudence is to give cheerfulness to those hours which splendour cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate; those soft intervals of unbended amusement, in which a man shrinks to his natural dimensions, and throws aside the ornaments or disguises which he feels in privacy to be useless incumbrances, and to lose all effect when they become familiar. To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

[W]ith an unquiet mind, neither exercise, nor diet, nor physick can be of much use.

He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

The balls of sight are so formed, that one man's eyes are spectacles to another, to read his heart with.