It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is...
All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves.
A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity
Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.
If one waits for the right time to come before writing, the right time never comes.
The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot, be alienated.