Lord Bath used to say of women, who are apt to say that they will follow their own judgment, that they could not follow a worse guide.

I never found even in my juvenile hours that it was necessary to go a thousand miles in search of themes for moralizing.

In science, mistakes always precede the truth

One's mind suffers only when one is young and while one is ignorant of the world. When one has lived for some time, one learns that the young think too little and the old too much, and one grows careless about both.

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.

Shakespeare had no tutors but nature and genius. He caught his faults from the bad taste of his contemporaries. In an age still less civilized Shakespeare might have been wilder, but would not have been vulgar.

Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.