That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
Books, the children of the brain.
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together; Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.
Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.
He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.
A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.
Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.
Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.