Of many, imagined blessings it may be doubted whether he that wants or possesses them had more reason to be satisfied with his lot.

It is to be steadily inculcated, that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness.

A man finds in the productions of nature an inexhaustible stock of material on which he can employ himself, without any temptations to envy or malevolence, and has always a certain prospect of discovering new reasons for adoring the sovereign author of the universe.

The hopes of zeal are not wholly groundless.

To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude; it is not retreat, but exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

The care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from defects of nature.

Moral sentences appear ostentatious and tumid, when they have no greater occasions than the journey of a wit to his home town: yet such pleasures and such pains make up the general mass of life; and as nothing is little to him that feels it with gre