“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.”

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

The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.

There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.

Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps 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.

I love good creditable acquaintance; I love to be the worst of the company.

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

Everyone desires long life, not one old age.

Don’t set your wit against a child.

Many a truth is told in jest.

For to enter the 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.

Perverseness is your whole defence.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.

The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.

I was here, and I loaded a shotgun on Independence Day, but I didn’t kill anybody.

Attachment is the strongest block to realization.

Society expects man to be a passive social animal who believes like the People of the Field in “Jurgen” that “to do what you always have done” and “what is expected of you” are the twin rules of life.

A devotee who can call on God while living a householder’s life is a hero indeed. God thinks: ‘He is blessed indeed who prays to me in the midst of his worldly duties.

No government has ever been, or can ever be, wherein time-servers and blockheads will not be uppermost.

Manipulated by fashion, self-serving art scholars and the vagaries of the auction block.

A majority of women seem to consider themselves sent into the world for the sole purpose of displaying dry goods, and it is only when acting the part of an animated milliner’s block that they feel they are performing their appropriate mission.

If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain.