The several sorts of religion in the world are little more than so many spiritual monopolies..

True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes..

In our corrupted state, common weaknesses and defects contribute more towards the reconciling us to one another than all the precepts of the philosop….

The Triumph of Wit is to make your good Nature subdue your Censure; to be quick in seeing Faults, and slow in exposing them. You are to consider, tha….

Friendship cannot live with ceremony, nor without civility..

Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is very good company by the way..

Nothing would more contribute to make a man wise than to have always an enemy in his view..

I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford..

Most men's anger about religion is as if two men should quarrel for a lady they neither of them care for..

Formality is sufficiently revenged upon the world for being so unreasonably laughed at; it is destroyed, it is true, but it hath the spiteful satisfa….

There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill natured..

A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy..

A fool hath no dialogue within himself, the first thought carrieth him without the reply of a second..

The more arguments you win, the less friends you will have.

If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers..

The plainer the dress, the greater luster does beauty appear..

A man that steps aside from the world and has leisure to observe it without interest and design, thinks all mankind as mad as they think him..

Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts..

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it..

The best party is but a kind of conspiracy against the rest of the nation..

The past is the best way to suppose what may come..