Music is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Judgment is forced upon us by experience

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.

There are, indeed, few kinds of composition from which an author, however learned or ingenious, can hope a long continuance of fame.

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.