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Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world. Yet from this lesson thou will learn to avoid the frog's foolish ambition of swelling to rival the bigness of the ox.
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Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse.
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The proof of the pudding is the eating.
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I can tell where my own shoe pinches me.
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But do not give it to a lawyer's clerk to write, for they use a legal hand that Satan himself will not understand.
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It will be seen in the frying of the eggs.
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There is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war.
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I do not believe that the Good Lord plays dice.
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I shall be as secret as the grave.
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There is no greater folly in the world than for a man to despair.
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No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly.
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By the streets of 'by and by,' one arrives at the house of 'never'.
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Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.
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You are a devil at everything, and there is no kind of thing in the 'versal world but what you can turn your hand into.
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A knowledge of thyself will preserve thee from vanity.
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There is a strange charm in the thoughts of a good legacy, or the hopes of an estate, which wondrously removes or at least alleviates the sorrow that men would otherwise feel for the death of friends.
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Take away the motive, and you take away the sin.
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Be a terror to the butchers, that they may be fair in their weight; and keep hucksters and fraudulent dealers in awe, for the same reason.
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I would have nobody to control me; I would be absolute: and who but I? Now, he that is absolute can do what he likes; he that can do what he likes can take his pleasure; he that can take his pleasure can be content; and he that can be content has no more to desire. So the matter 's over; and come what will come, I am satisfied.
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It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.
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Can we ever have too much of a good thing?
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He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all.
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In the night all cats are gray.
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The wise hand does not all the tongue dictates.