Trust as little as you can to report, and examine all you can by your own senses.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

Ignorance cannot always be inferred from inaccuracy; knowledge is not always present.

Where there is emulation, there will be vanity; where there is vanity, there will be folly.

You need a good editor because every writer thinks he can write a War and Peace, but by the time he gets it on paper, it's not War and Peace anymore; it's comic-book stuff. Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquility.

There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself.