In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity;—in that of poets of amusement—in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition,—and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.

Reputation is the road to power

Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove.

All poetry is misrepresentation.

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

Those physical difficulties which you cannot account for, be very slow to arraign; for he that would be wiser than Nature would be wiser than God.