Much is due to those who first broke the way to knowledge, and left only to their successors the task of smoothing it.
Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.
Virtue is too often merely local.
A book should teach us to enjoy life, or to endure it.
Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
All unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future, which has not been given us.