If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.

Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust. Hatred alone is immortal.

The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters. His ruling passion is the love of fame.

The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.

There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character.

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.

Silence is one great art of conversation.