The great charm of poetry consists in lively pictures of the sublime passions, magnanimity, courage, disdain of fortune; or thoseof the tender affections, love and friendship; which warm the heart, and diffuse over it similar sentiments and emotions.

The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds.

Art may make a suite of clothes, but nature must produce a man.

It is a certain rule that wit and passion are entirely incompatible. When the affections are moved, there is no place for the imagination.

One would appear ridiculous who would say, that it is only probable the sun will rise to-morrow, or that all men must die; thoughit is plain we have no further assurance of these facts than what experience affords us.

To invent without scruple a new principle to every new phenomenon, instead of adapting it to the old; to overload our hypothesis with a variety of this kind, are certain proofs that none of these principles is the just one, and that we only desire, by a number of falsehoods, to cover our ignorance of the truth.

Moving from an objective statement of fact to a subjective statement of value does not work, because it leaves open questions that have not been answered.