Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

To mean understandings, it is sufficient honour to be numbered amongst the lowest labourers of learning; but different abilities must find different tasks. To hew stone, would have been unworthy of Palladio; and to have rambled in search of shells and flowers, had but ill suited with the capacity of Newton.

We seldom learn the true want of what we have till it is discovered that we can have no more.

A merchant may, perhaps, be a man of an enlarged mind, but there is nothing in trade connected with an enlarged mind.

Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.

Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.

Hope is an amusement rather than a good, and adapted to none but very tranquil minds.