Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
Jonathan Swift
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
May you live all the days of your life.
A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.
He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
No wise man ever wished to be younger.
There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.
Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.
Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.
The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.
As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.
Books, the children of the brain.
Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.
I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.
My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.
Don't set your wit against a child.
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than yesterday.
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
Every dog must have his day.
The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.
Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together; Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.
Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.
Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.
Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.
I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.
