Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.

In the common run of mankind, for one that is wise and good you find ten of a contrary character.

Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honoris a private station.

I consider time as an in immense ocean, in which many noble authors are entirely swallowed up.

Sir Francis Bacon observed that a well-written book, compared with its rivals and antagonists, is like Moses' serpent, that immediately swallowed up and devoured those of the Egyptians.

Love is a second life; it grows into the soul, warms every vein, and beats in every pulse.

Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition.