[C]ourage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.

Never trust your tongue when your heart is bitter.

While an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his worst performance; and when he is dead, we rate him by his best.

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of the scholar