An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.

Comedy naturally wears itself out -- destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.

The busier we are the more leisure we have.

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.

Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.

The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might of been.