We may take Fancy for a companion, but must follow Reason as our guide.

He that voluntarily continues in ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.

Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.

You think I love flattery (says Dr. Johnson), and so I do; but a little too much always disgusts me: that fellow Richardson, on the contrary, could not be contented to sail quietly down the stream of reputation, without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar.

I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful; for not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such a uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to human kind.

Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.

Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.