Every art, like our own, has in its composition fluctuating as well as fixed principles. It is an attentive inquiry into their difference that will enable us to determine how far we are influenced by custom and habit, and what is fixed in the nature of things.

Taste depends upon those finer emotions which make the organization of the soul.

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.

It is but a poor eloquence which only shows that the orator can talk.

Nothing is denied to well-directed labor.

And he who does not know himself does not know others, so it may be said with equal truth, that he who does not know others knows himself but very imperfectly.