The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract. Whenever the mind of a writer is saturated with the full inspiration of a great author, a quotation gives completeness to the whole; it seals his feelings with undisputed authority.

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.

If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit, persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner.

Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins.

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.

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.

A circle may be small, yet it may be as mathematically beautiful and perfect as a large one.