When we know exactly all a man's views and how he comes to speak and act so and so, we lose any respect for him, though we may love and admire him.

In comparing these two writers, he [Samuel Johnson] used this expression: "that there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate." This was a short and a figurative statement of his distinction between drawing characters of nature and characters only of manners, but I cannot help being of opinion, that the neat watches of Fielding are as well constructed as the large clocks of Richardson, and that his dial plates are brighter.

Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

Melancholy cannot be clearly proved to others, so it is better to be silent about it.

There is indeed a strange prejudice against Quotation.

But what can a man see of a library being one day in it?

If a man is prodigal, he cannot be truly generous.