 I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose. |
| When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over. |
| The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor. |
| There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others. |
| You may keep your beauty and your health, unless you destroy them yourself, or discourage them to stay with you, by using them ill. |
| Authority is by nothing so much strengthened and confirmed as by custom; for no man easily distrusts the things which he and all men have been always bred up to. |
| The best rules to form a young man, are, to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one's own opinions, and value others that deserve it. |
| Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new. |
| Man's wisdom is his best friend; folly his worst enemy. |
| The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit. |
| Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed. |
| Our present time is indeed a criticizing and critical time, hovering between the wish, and the inability to believe. Our complaints are like arrows shot up into the air at no target: and with no purpose they only fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves. |
| The problem of evil... Why does God permit it? Or, if God is omnipotent, in which case permission and creation are the same, why did God create it? |
| When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don't, they don't. |
| The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies. |
| The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home. |
| No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else. |
