Criticism is like champagne, nothing more execrable if bad, nothing more excellent if good.

Women do not transgress the bounds of decorum so often as men; but when they do, they go greater lengths.

He that knows himself, knows others; and he that is ignorant of himself, could not write a very profound lecture on other men's heads.

Others, again, give us the mere carcass of another man’s thoughts, but deprived of all their life and spirit, and this is to add murder to robbery. I have somewhere seen it observed, that we should make the same use of a book, as a bee does of a flower; she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it; and those sweets she herself improves and concocts into honey. But most plagiarists, like the drone, have neither taste to select, nor industry to acquire, nor skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared from the hive.

Literature has her quacks no less than medicine, and they are divided into two classes; those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth; we shall get second-hand sense from the one, and original nonsense from the other.

Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.

The French have a saying that whatever excellence a man may exhibit in a public station he is very apt to be ridiculous in a private one.