Imitation is the highest form of flattery.

Secrecy is the soul of all great designs.

To look back to antiquity is one thing, to go back to it is another.

Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.

A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation.

Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants--both know too much of him.

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.