If you want enemies, excel others; if you want friends, let others excel you.

Deliberate with caution, but act with decision and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.

It is sufficiently humiliating to our nature to reflect that our knowledge is but as she rivulet, our ignorance as the sea. On points of the highest interest, the moment we quit the light of revelation we shall find that Platonism itself is intimately connected with Pyrrhonism, and the deepest inquiry with the darkest doubt.

Words indeed are but the signs and counters of knowledge, and their currency should be strictly regulated by the capital which they represent.

It is a mortifying truth, and ought to teach the wisest of us humility, that many of the most valuable discoveries have been the result of chance rather than of contemplation, and of accident rather than of design.

That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.

Honor is unstable and seldom the same; for she feeds upon opinion, and is as fickle as her food.