What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have I said anything that you understand? Then I ask pardon of the rest of the company.
Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.
Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.
All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.
The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.
It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.
Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.
Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.
One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
The happiest part of a man’s life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.
The Supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things – the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.
Every other enjoyment malice may destroy; every other panegyric envy may withhold; but no human power can deprive the boaster of his own encomiums.
Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.
Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.
This merriment of parsons is mighty offensive.
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
He who praises every body, praises nobody.
What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.
Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.
Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.
A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.
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