It is not often that any man can have so much knowledge of another, as is necessary to make instruction useful.

You cannot, by all the lecturing in the world, enable a man to make a shoe.

The good of our present state is merely comparative, and the evil which every man feels will be sufficient to disturb and harass him if he does not know how much he escapes.

I am sorry I have not learnt to play at cards. It is very useful in life: it generates kindness, and consolidates society.

A student may easily exhaust his life in comparing divines and moralists without any practical regard to morals and religion; he may be learning not to live but to reason... while the chief use of his volumes is unthought of, his mind is unaffected, and his life is unreformed.

Instead of rating the man by his performances, we rate too frequently the performances by the man.

Every man speaks and writes with intent to be understood; and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself, might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired; but when once he begins to contrive how his sentiments may be received, not with most ease to his reader, but with most advantage to himself, he then transfers his consideration from words to sounds, from sentences to periods, and, as he grows more elegant, becomes less intelligible.