It was easier to conquer it than to know what to do with it.

Cunning is neither the consequence of sense, nor does it give sense. A proof that it is not sense, is that cunning people never imagine that others can see through them. It is the consequence of weakness.

Exercise is the worst thing in the world and as bad an invention as gunpowder.

Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.

Nothing has shown more fully the prodigious ignorance of human ideas and their littleness, than the discovery of [Sir William] Herschell, that what used to be called the Milky Way is a portion of perhaps an infinite multitude of worlds!

It is charming to totter into vogue.

The wisest prophets make sure of the event first.