No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.

This world cannot explain its own difficulties without the assistance of another.

There are two things which ought to teach us to think but meanly of human glory; the very best have had their calumniators, the very worst their panegyrists.

Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.

Error, when she retraces her steps, has farther to go before she can arrive at truth than ignorance.

There are three difficulties in authorship;-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game; in which the Booksellers are the Kings; The Critics the Knaves; the Public, the Pack; and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon.

Genius, in one respect, is like gold; numbers of persons are constantly writing about both, who have neither.