What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

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.

Invention is almost the only literary labour which blindness cannot obstruct.

Marriage is the best state for man in general, and every man is a worst man in proportion to the level he is unfit for marriage.

Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.

Those who will not take the trouble to think for themselves, have always somebody that thinks for them; and the difficulty in writing is to please those from whom others learn to be pleased.

Self-love is a busy prompter.