What have I gained by health? Intolerable dullness. What by mode meals? A total blank.

I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me.

Philanthropy, like charity, must begin at home.

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.

Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.

Oh, ever thus, from childhood's hour, I 've seen my fondest hopes decay; I never loved a tree or flower But 't was the first to fade away. I never nurs'd a dear gazelle, To glad me with its soft black eye, But when it came to know me well And love me, it was sure to die.