Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs.
Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.
Old sciences are unraveled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot.
Brutes find out where their talents lie; a bear will not attempt to fly.
Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy, is the best bred man in company.
She has more goodness in her little finger than he has in his whole body.
An intelligent person should put money in the beginning, but not in heart
Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent.
However roguish a man may be, he always loves to deal with an honest man.
It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer; I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.
Ale is meat, drink and cloth; it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.
I love good creditable acquaintance; I love to be the worst of the company.
Learning consists of ideas, and not of the noise that is made by the mouth.
Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
Orators inflame the people, whose anger is really but a short fit of madness.
Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature.
Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the Third of five Sons.
Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.
Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.
Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.
Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.
Conquerors never, never conquer a nation to bring freedom. They brought control.
There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.
He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.
A stander-by may sometimes, perhaps, see more of the game than he that plays it.
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
Conversation is but carving! Give no more to every guest Than he's able to digest.
Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
An English tongue, if refined to a certain standard, might perhaps be fixed forever.
What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.
The lack of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.
Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.
Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.
The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.
Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.
There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.
The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.
Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.