There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect; compared with which reproach, hatred, and opposition are names of happiness; yet this worst, this meanest fate, every one who dares to write has reason to fear.

We owe to memory not only the increase of our knowledge, and our progress in rational inquiries, but many other intellectual pleasures

Friendship, compounded of esteem and love, derives from one its tenderness and its permanence from the other.

It is however, reasonable, to have perfection in our eye; that we may always advance towards it, though we know it never can be reached.

This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.

No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.

He that can swim needs not despair to fly; to swim is to fly in a grosser fluid, and to fly is to swim in a subtler. We are only to proportion our power of resistance to the different density of matter through which we are to pass. You will be necessarily upborne by the air if you can renew any impulse upon it faster than the air can recede from the pressure.