Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.

As pride sometimes is hid under humility, idleness if often covered by turbulence and hurry.

How gloomy would be the mansions of the dead to him who did not know that he should never die: that what now acts shall continue its agency, and what now thinks shall think on forever!

Such are the vicissitudes of the world, through all its parts, that day and night, labor and rest, hurry and retirement, endear each other; such are the changes that keep the mind in action: we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else and begin a new pursuit.

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

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.