Whatever the number of a man's friends, there will be times in his life when he has one too few; but if he has only one enemy, he is lucky indeed if he has not one too many.

A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.

We tell our triumphs to the crowds, but our own hearts are the sole confidants of our sorrows.

In science, address the few, in literature the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgement on the few.

Tell me, sweet eyes, from what divinest star did ye drink in your liquid melancholy?

He whom God hath gifted with a love of retirement possesses, as it were, an extra sense.

Westward, beyond the still pleasant, but, even then, no longer solitary, hamlet of Charing, a broad space, broken here and there by scattered houses and venerable pollards, in the early spring of 1467, presented the rural scene for the sports and pastimes of the inhabitants of Westminister and London.