"The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street."

"Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other."

"The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen."

"Man is not weak; knowledge is more than equivalent to force."

"I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just."

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

"If any man wants to gain a good opinion of his fellow men, he ought to do what I am doing: pester them with letters."

"The limit of man's knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination."

"If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him."

"I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read."

"To proceed from one truth to another, and connect distant propositions by regular consequences, is the great prerogative of man"

"Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him."

"Claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy"

"A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good."

"Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy."

"No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company."

"His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises."

"No two men can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other."

"Dr Blair . . . asked . . . whether he thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems [Ossian] . . . `Yes, Sir, many men, many women, and many children.'"

"Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends."

"We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

"I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men"

"The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man."

"I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of."