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

It is the care of a very great part of mankind to conceal their indigence from the rest. They support themselves by temporary expedients, and every day is lost in contriving for to-morrow.

Those who attempt nothing themselves think every thing easily performed, and consider the unsuccessful always as criminal.

There is no kind of idleness by which we are so easily seduced as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of business.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

Critics ought never to be consulted, but while errors may yet be rectified or insipidity suppressed. But when the book has once been dismissed into the world, and can be no more retouched, I know not whether a very different conduct should not be prescribed, and whether firmness and spirit may not sometimes be of use to overpower arrogance and repel brutality.

To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.