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.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

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

A transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city.

Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.

Most men are more willing to indulge in easy vices than to practise laborious virtues.

The misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.