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| Ceremony is the invention of wise men to keep fools at a distance. | 1 |
| Fire and sword are but slow engines of destruction in comparison with the tongue of the babbler. | 2 |
| He that wants good sense is unhappy in having learning, for he has thereby only more ways of exposing himself; and he that has sense knows that learning is not knowledge, but rather the art of using it. | 3 |
| I cannot think of any character below the flatterer, except he that envies him. | 4 |
| I know no evil so great as the abuse of the understanding, and yet there is no one vice more common. | 5 |
| I look upon an able statesman out of business like a huge whale, that will endeavour to overturn the ship unless he has an empty cask to play with. | 6 |
| It is a great ease to have one in our own shape a species below us, and who, without being enlisted in our service, is by nature of our retinue. | 7 |
| Man thinks he has an estate of reputation, and is glad to see one that will bring any of it home to him; it is no matter how dirty a bag it is conveyed to him in, or by how clownish a messenger, so the money is good. | 8 |
| Men of courage, men of sense, and men of letters are frequent; but a true gentleman is what one seldom sees. | 9 |
| Men spend their lives in the service of their passions instead of employing their passions in the service of their lives. | 10 |
| Nothing can atone for the want of modesty, without which beauty is ungraceful and wit detestable. | 11 |
| Of all evils in story-telling, the humour of telling tales one after another in great numbers is the least supportable. | 12 |
| Praise from an enemy is the most pleasing of all commendations. | 13 |
| Simplicity is, of all things, the hardest to be copied. | 14 |
| The coxcomb is a fool of parts, a flatterer a knave of parts. | 15 |
| The fool is in himself the object of pity till he is flattered. | 16 |
| The Latin word for a flatterer (assentator) implies no more than a person that barely consents; and indeed such a one, if a man were able to purchase or maintain him, cannot be bought too dear. | 17 |
| The reason that there is such a general outcry against flatterers is, that there are so very few good ones. | 18 |
| There is something so moving in the very image of weeping beauty. | 19 |
| They who resign life rather than part with liberty do only a prudent action; out those who lay it down for friends and country do a heroic one. | 20 |
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| Very great benefactors to the rich, or those whom they call people at their ease, are your persons of no consequence. | 21 |
| What we want to be pleased with flattery, is to believe that the man is sincere who gives it us. | 22 |
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