Beauty, like supreme dominion is best supported by opinion.

Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.

Surely mortal man is a broomstick!

Sweeping from butcher's stalls, dung, guts, and blood,

Drown'd puppies, stinking sprats, all drench'd in mud,

Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood.

Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine and women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age.

'T is an old maxim in the schools, That flattery 's the food of fools; Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit.

Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.

Orators inflame the people, whose anger is really but a short fit of madness.

Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.

Brutes find out where their talents lie; a bear will not attempt to fly.

Fame and censure, with a tether,

By fate are always link'd together.

For, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition: that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.

Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy, is the best bred man in company.

An excuse is a lie guarded.

And though the villain 'scape a while, he feels. Slow vengeance, like a bloodhound, at his heels.

Or darns his hose, or mends his breeches, While Harry's fencing up his ditches.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence and merit.

Hay is for horses.

Bread is the staff of life.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.