He [Pliny the Elder] used to say that 'no book [etc] was so bad but some good might be got out of it'.

Unfinished paintings are more admired than the finished because the artist's actual thoughts are left visible.

Necessity, that excellent master, hath taught me many things.

Let us strive the more earnestly therefore to lengthen out our span of life-- life that is poured out like water and falls as the leaf-- if not by action (the means to which lie in another's power), yet in any case by study and research; and since it is not granted us to live long, let us transmit to posterity some memorial that we have at least lived.

So we must work at our profession and not make anybody else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners; it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard.

The highest of characters is his who is as ready to pardon the moral errors of mankind as if he were every day guilty of them himself; and as cautious of committing a fault as if he never forgave one.

That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing.