Friends are often chosen for similitude of manners, and therefore each palliates the other's failings because they are his own.

It is common to overlook what is near by keeping the eye fixed on something remote.

The future is bought with the present.

In his comic scenes, Shakespeare seems to produce, without labor, what no labor can improve.

When a language begins to teem with books, it is tending to refinement; as those who undertake to teach others must have undergone some labour in improving themselves, they set a proportionate value on their own thoughts, and wish to enforce them by efficacious expressions; speech becomes embodied and permanent; different modes and phrases are compared, and the best obtains an establishment. By degrees one age improves upon another.

In the motive lies the good or ill.

Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason. We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them.