Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.

The thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occupations, where the mind has leisure to must during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh and wakeful breezes blowing round it.

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life. Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.

I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election.

Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the most civilized in the day's of Augustus are now in a state of hopeless barbarism.

Some men so dislike the dust kicked up by the generation they belong to, that, being unable to pass, they lag behind it.

How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world.