It is our first duty to serve society, and after we have done that, we may attend wholly to the salvation of our own souls.

Leave to Heaven the measure and the choice.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

The uniform necessities of human nature produce in a great measure uniformity of life, and for part of the day make one place like another; to dress and to undress, to eat and to sleep, are the same in London as in the country.

There is a frightful interval between the seed and the timber.

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.