A lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom.

A nickname is the hardest stone that the devil can throw at a man.

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.

Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.

There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books and papers in order--that is, according to their notions of the matter--and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor anybody else can find them. This is a sort of magpie faculty. If anything is left where you want it, it is called litter. There is a pedantry in housewifery, as well as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he could not see comfortably to work again for several days.

Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.

The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.