Gayety is to good-humor as perfumes to vegetable fragrance: the one overpowers weak spirits; the other recreates and revives them.

A newswriter is a man without virtue, who lies at home for his own profit.

No degree of knowledge attainable by man is able to set him above the want of hourly assistance.

Prudence operates on life in the same manner as rule of composition; it produces vigilance rather than elevation; rather prevents loss than procures advantage; and often miscarriages, but seldom reaches either power or honor.

My diseases are an asthma and a dropsy and, what is less curable, seventy-five.

No writer can be fully convicted of imitation except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are copied.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.