1. “A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.”
2. “As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.”
3. “A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than yesterday.”
4. “A wise man is never less alone than when he is alone.”
5. “Books, the children of the brain.”
6. “Bread is the staff of life.”
7. “Ever eating, never cloying,
All-devouring, all-destroying,
Never finding full repast,
Till I eat the world at last.”
8. “I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”
9. "Instead of dirt and poison we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light."
10. “It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.”
11. “It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.”
12. “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”
13. ”It may be prudent in me to act sometimes by other mens reason, but I can think only by my own.”
14. “Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.”
15. “May you live all the days of your life.”
16. “No wise man ever wished to be younger.”
17. “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own, which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
18. “So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.”
19. “That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.”
20. “The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.”
21. “The first project was to shorten discourse by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out verbs and participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but nouns.”
22. "The Manner whereby the Soul and Body are united, and how they are distinguished, is wholly unaccountable to us. We see but one Part, and yet we know we consist of two; and this is a Mystery we cannot comprehend any more than that of the Trinity."
23. “The most accomplished way of using books at present is two-fold; either first, to serve them as some men do lords, learn their titles exactly and then brag of their acquiantance. Or secondly, which is indeed the choicer, the profounder, and politer method, to get a thorough insight into the index, by which the whole book is governed and turned, like fishes by the tail. For, to enterthe palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms; therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back door. For the arts are all in a flying march, and therefore more easily subdued by attacking them in the rear. Thus physicians discover the state of the whole body by consulting only what comes from behind. Thus men catch knowledge by throwing their wit on the posteriors of book, as boys do sparrows with flinging salt upon their tails.”
24. “There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.”
25. “The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.”
26. “The two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.”
27. “Those dreams, that on the silent night intrude,
And with false flitting shades our minds delude,
Jove never sends us downward from the skies;
Nor can they from infernal mansions rise;
But are all mere productions of the brain,
And fools consult interpreters in vain.”
28. "Vision is the art of seeing things invisible."
29. "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
30. ”We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in consultation upon improving that of their own country.
The first project was to shorten discourse by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out verbs and participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but nouns.
The other project was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health as well as brevity. For it is plain that every word we speak is in some degree a diminution of our lungs by corrosion, and consequently contributes to the shortening of our lives. An expedient was therefore offered, that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on. And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction
with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion, unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people.”
31. “When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
