You cannot, by all the lecturing in the world, enable a man to make a shoe.

Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.

Moderation is commonly firm, and firmness is commonly successful.

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

A small country town is not the place in which one would choose to quarrel with a wife; every human being in such places is a spy.

Health is so necessary to all the duties, as well as pleasures of life, that the crime of squandering it is equal to the folly.

Genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates.