The charm of London is that you are never glad or sorry for ten minutes together; in the country you are one or the other for weeks.

Irresolution and mutability are often the faults of men whose views are wide, and whose imagination is vigorous and excursive.

Hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords; but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain.

If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.

The authour who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with thoughts and elegances out of the same general magazine of literature, can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he digs his marble out of the same quarry, squares his stones by the same art, and unites them in columns of the same orders.

Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future.

When two Eglishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.