Revenge is fever in our own blood, to be cured only by letting the blood of another; but the remedy too often produces a relapse, which is remorse--a malady far more dreadful than the first disease, because it is incurable.

It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.

With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition is reversed; the throes are in the conception, the pleasure in the birth.

Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret.

Light, whether it be material or moral, is the best reformer.

All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser; although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid.

War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.