Our English people are much addicted to raising idols, and then revenging themselves on their own idolatry by knocking down and demolishing the poor bits of wood and stone that they had worshipped as gods. How many literary reputations have been so treated!

That bad letters of every kind arise from want of the habit of thinking, I cannot doubt.

The slightest emotion of disinterested kindness that passes through the mind improves and refreshes that mind, producing generous thought and noble feeling, as the sun and rain foster your favourite flowers. Cherish kind wishes, my children; for a time may come when you may be enabled to put them in practice.

We may admire people for being wise, but we like them best when they are foolish.

I have still the best comforts of life - books and friendships - and I trust never to lose my relish for either.

... they know little of the passions who seek to argue with that most intractable of them all, the fear that is born of love.

The power of admiring whatever is deserving of admiration, the nice and quick perception of the beautiful and the true, is one of the highest and noblest of our faculties, born of taste, and knowledge, and wisdom, or rather it is taste, and wisdom, and knowledge, in one rare and great combination.