of satire against lawyers than that of
astrologers, when they pretend by rules of art to tell when a suit will
end, and whether to the advantage of the plaintiff or defendant; thus
making the matter depend entirely upon the influence of the stars,
without the least regard to the merits of the cause.

The expression in Apocrypha about Tobit and his dog following him I have
often heard ridiculed, yet Homer has the same words of Telemachus more
than once; and Virgil says something like it of Evander. And I take the
book of Tobit to be partly poetical.

I have known some men possessed of good qualities, which were very
serviceable to others, but useless to themselves; like a sun-dial on the
front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the
owner within.

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion,
learning, etc., beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a
bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told
expressly: that they neither marry, nor are given in marriage.

It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of a spider.

The Stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is
like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.

Physicians ought not to give their judgment of religion, for the same
reason that butchers are not admitted to be jurors upon life and death.

The reason why so few marriages are happy, is, because young ladies spend
their time in making nets, not in making cages.

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the
merriest countenances in mourning coaches.

Nothing more unqualifies a man to act with prudence than a misfortune
that is attended with shame and guilt.

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

Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is
performed in the same posture with creeping.

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.

Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps
as few know their own strength. It is, in men as in soils, where
sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.

Satire is reckoned the easiest of all wit, but I take it to be otherwise
in very bad times: for it is as hard to satirise w