This man [Chesterfield], I thought, had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords.

Sleep is a state in which a great part of every life is passed. No animal has yet been discovered, whose existence is not varied with intervals of insensibility; and some late philosophers have extended the empire of sleep over the vegetable world.

To be prejudiced is always to be weak

Words are daughters of earth but ideas are sons of heaven.

Towering is the confidence of twenty-one.

There is scarcely any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy, and delighted himself and his reader with the melody of birds, the whisper of groves, and the murmur of rivulets.

There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself.