We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

...it will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor.

He who would govern his actions by the laws of virtue must regulate his thoughts by those of reason.

The good of our present state is merely comparative, and the evil which every man feels will be sufficient to disturb and harass him if he does not know how much he escapes.

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion, than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.

Unconstraint is the grace of conversation.