Novels may teach us as wholesome a moral as the pulpit. There are "sermons in stones," in healthy books, and "good in everything.

Those graces which from their presumed facility encourage all to attempt an imitation of them, are usually the most inimitable.

The rich are more envied by those who have a little, than by those who have nothing.

Words indeed are but the signs and counters of knowledge, and their currency should be strictly regulated by the capital which they represent.

Very great personages are not likely to form very just estimates either of others or of themselves; their knowledge of themselves is obscured by the flattery of others; their knowledge of others is equally clouded by circumstances peculiar to themselves. For in the presence of the great, the modest are sure to suffer from too much diffidence, and the confident from too much display.

Ambition is to the mind what the cap is to the falcon; it blinds us first, and then compels us to tower by reason of our blindness.

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.