The business of a poet is to examine not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

People in distress never think that you feel enough.

Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination.

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.