Whatever is proposed, it is much easier to find reasons for rejecting than embracing.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

Commerce can never be at a stop while one man wants what another can supply; and credit will never be denied, while it is likely to be repaid with profit.

He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.

Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.

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

Hunger is never delicate.