[French] authors are more afraid of offending delicacy and rules, than ambitious of sublimity.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Art is the filigrain of a little mind, and is twisted and involved and curled, but would reach farther if laid out in a straight line.

The Methodists love your big sinners, as proper subjects to work upon.

I have sometimes seen women, who would have been sensible enough, if they would have been content not to be called women of sense--but by aiming at what they had not, they only proved absurd--for sense cannot be counterfeited.

Without grace no book can live, and with it the poorest may have its life prolonged.

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.