Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

Of a thousand shavers, two do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished.

That what cannot be repaired is not to be regretted.

Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all.

Nothing detains the reader's attention more powerfully than deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune; and these might be abundantly afforded by memoirs of the sons of literature. They are entangled by contracts which they know not how to fulfill, and obliged to write on subjects which they do not understand. Every publication is a new period of time, from which some increase or declension of fame is to be reckoned. The gradations of a hero's life are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book.

Gaiety is to good-humor as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance. The one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them. Gaiety seldom fails to give some pain; good-humor boasts no faculties which every one does not believe in his own power, and pleases principally by not offending.

Hope is an amusement rather than a good, and adapted to none but very tranquil minds.