The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.

One may quote till one compiles.

There is an art of reading, an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

There is a society in the deepest solitude.

Such do not always understand the authors whose names adorn their barren pages, and which are taken, too, from the third or the thirtieth hand. Those who trust to such false quoters will often learn how contrary this transmission is to the sense and application of the original. Every transplantation has altered the fruit of the tree; every new channel, the quality of the stream in its remove from the spring-head.