How clever you are, to know something of which you are ignorant.

I am not at all in a humour for writing; I must write on till I am.

We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous.

Do not give way to useless alarm; though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.

A lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it.