When a language begins to teem with books, it is tending to refinement; as those who undertake to teach others must have undergone some labour in improving themselves, they set a proportionate value on their own thoughts, and wish to enforce them by efficacious expressions; speech becomes embodied and permanent; different modes and phrases are compared, and the best obtains an establishment. By degrees one age improves upon another.

I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain.

When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality.

It is observed of gold, by an old epigrammatist, that to have it is to be in fear, and to want it is to be in sorrow.

The charm of London is that you are never glad or sorry for ten minutes together; in the country you are one or the other for weeks.

A blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.

Men go to sea, before they know the unhappiness of that way of life; and when they have come to know it, they cannot escape from it, because it is then too late to choose another profession; as indeed is generally the case with men, when they have once engaged in any particular way of life.