With books, as with companions, it is of more consequence to know which to avoid, than which to choose; for good books are as scarce as good companions...

Those that know the least of others think the highest of themselves.

The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.

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.

Sensibility would be a good portress if she had but one hand; with her right she opens the door to pleasure, but with her left to pain.

Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.

Time,- that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities.