The labor of thinking was so great to me, that having once come to a conclusion upon any subject, I would rather persist in it, right or wrong, than be at the trouble of going over the process again to revise and rectify my judgment.

Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.

I ... practiced all the arts of apology, evasion, and invisibility, to which procrastinators must sooner or later be reduced.

There are two sorts of content; one is connected with exertion, the other with habits of indolence. The first is a virtue; the other, a vice.

[On collectors of quotations:] How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets.

Fortune's wheel never stands still the highest point is therefore the most perilous.

Justice satisfies everybody.