Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgment and friendship are like being enlivened.

Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

No writer can be fully convicted of imitation except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are copied.

There are occasions on which all apology is rudeness.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.

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.

No estimate is more in danger of erroneous calculations than those by which a man computes the force of his own genius.