[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.

[The] emperor of the West, the feeble and dissolute Valentinian, [had] reached his thirty-fifth year without attaining the age of reason or courage.

When Julian ascended the throne, he declared his impatience to embrace and reward the Syrian sophist, who had preserved, in a degenerate age, the Grecian purity of taste, of manners and of religion. The emperor's prepossession was increased and justified by the discreet pride of his favourite.

Greek is a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.

The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul; and it is well known, that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes.

Greek is doubtless the most perfect [language] that has been contrived by the art of man.

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.