Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.
— Benjamin Franklin
When befriended, remember it; when you befriend, forget it.
In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.
The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.
It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.
Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?
If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.
Beware the hobby that eats.
The discontented man finds no easy chair.
Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel.
Half a truth is often a great lie.
Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.
The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.
He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.
Nine men in ten are would be suicides.
Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.
Most people return small favors, acknowledge medium ones and repay greater ones - with ingratitude.
Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.
He that waits upon fortune, is never sure of a dinner.
It is much easier to suppress a first desire than to satisfy those that follow.
Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don't have brains enough to be honest.
Remember that credit is money.
Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease.
We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.
Wise men don't need advice. Fools won't take it.
Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Never confuse motion with action.
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
The use of money is all the advantage there is in having it.
The first mistake in public business is the going into it.
Words may show a man's wit but actions his meaning.
There never was a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.
Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.
He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.
The eye of the master will do more work than both his hands.
If you desire many things, many things will seem few.
Rather go to bed without dinner than to rise in debt.
We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
When you're finished changing, you're finished.
At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.
I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.
If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him.
The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.
You can bear your own faults, and why not a fault in your wife?
Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
