Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.

It is our first duty to serve society, and after we have done that, we may attend wholly to the salvation of our own souls.

A thousand years may elapse before there shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past.

It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom; or that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view, by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact.

Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.