A house may draw visitors, but it is the possessor alone that can detain them.

Fame is an undertaker that pays but little attention to the living, but bedizens the dead, furnishes out their funerals, and follows them to the grave

If you want enemies, excel others; if you want friends, let others excel you.

We own almost all our knowledge not to those who have agreed but to those who have differed.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

Despotism can no more exist in a nation until the liberty of the press be destroyed than the night can happen before the sun is set.

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.