Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.

Friendship, of itself a holy tie, is made more sacred by adversity.

In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the act of death annihilates sensation; but there are many roads to death, and some of them justly formidable, even to the bravest.

Sir Richard Steele has observed, that there is this difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England: the one professes to be infallible, the other to be never in the wrong.

By paying our other debts, we are equal with all mankind; but in refusing to pay a debt of revenge, we are superior.

Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.

Time ... advances like the slowest tide, but retreats like the swiftest torrent.