A book should teach us to enjoy life, or to endure it.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

The love of retirement has in all ages adhered closely to those minds which have been most enlarged by knowledge, or elevated by genius. Those who enjoyed everything generally supposed to confer happiness have been forced to seek it in the shades of privacy.

He was dull in a new way, and that made many think him great.

If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.

The mental disease of the present generation is impatience of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom, and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and natural sagacity.

Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration, - judgement, to estimate things at their true value.