Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.

To those who have lived long together, everything heard and everything seen recalls some pleasure communicated, some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life.

Critics ought never to be consulted, but while errors may yet be rectified or insipidity suppressed. But when the book has once been dismissed into the world, and can be no more retouched, I know not whether a very different conduct should not be prescribed, and whether firmness and spirit may not sometimes be of use to overpower arrogance and repel brutality.

It is as bad as bad can be: it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest.

This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

As the greatest liar tells more truths than falsehoods, so may it be said of the worst man, that he does more good than evil.