Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity.

Much is due to those who first broke the way to knowledge, and left only to their successors the task of smoothing it.

A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.

False taste is always busy to mislead those that are entering upon the regions of learning; and the traveller, uncertain of his way, and forsaken by the sun, will be pleased to see a fainter orb arise on the horizon, that may rescue him from total darkness, though with weak and borrowed lustre.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

Thought is always troublesome to him who lives without his own approbation.

All violation of established practice implies in its own nature a rejection of the common opinion, a defiance of common censure, and an appeal from general laws to private judgment: he, therefore, who differs form others without apparent advantage, ought not to be angry if his arrogance is punished with ridicule; if those whose example he superciliously overlooks, point him out to derision, and hoot him back again into the common road.