The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.