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

The great end of prudence is to give cheerfulness to those hours which splendour cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate; those soft intervals of unbended amusement, in which a man shrinks to his natural dimensions, and throws aside the ornaments or disguises which he feels in privacy to be useless incumbrances, and to lose all effect when they become familiar. To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

It is better to live rich than to die rich.

Those authors who would find many readers, must endeavour to please while they instruct.

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Every reader should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence, and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible