[The] taste [of the French] is too timid to be true taste--or is but half taste.

How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians.

Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.

It is charming to totter into vogue.

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.

By deafness one gains in one respect more than one loses; one misses more nonsense than sense.