A poet is a painter of the soul.

It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.

The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours, and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves - the creature of habits and infirmities.

The greater part of our writers have become so original, that no one cares to imitate them: and those who never quote in return are seldom quoted.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

All this is labour which never meets the eye.... But too open and generous a revelation of the chapter and the page of the original quoted, has often proved detrimental to the legitimate honours of the quoter. They are unfairly appropriated by the next comer; the quoter is never quoted, but the authority he has afforded is produced by his successor with the air of an original research.

Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers.