For sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

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

Words are but the signs of ideas.

People may be taken in once, who imagine that an author is greater in private life than other men.

Almost all the moral good which is left among us is the apparent effect of physical evil.

Knowledge is praised and desired by multitudes whom her charms could never rouse from the couch of sloth; whom the faintest invitation of pleasure draws away from their studies; to whom any other method of wearing the day is more eligible than the use of books, and who are more easily engaged by any conversation than such as may rectify their notions or enlarge their comprehension.