Those authors who would find many readers, must endeavour to please while they instruct.

It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit; he that has once studiously developed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.

Dishonor waits on perfidy. A man should blush to think a falsehood; it is the crime of cowards.

Waste cannot be accurately told, though we are sensible how destructive it is. Economy, on the one hand, by which a certain income is made to maintain a man genteelly; and waste, on the other, by which on the same income another man lives shabbily, cannot be defined. It is a very nice thing; as one man wears his coat out much sooner than another, we cannot tell how.

They who look but little into futurity, have, perhaps, the quickest sensation of the present.

Few have abilities so much needed by the rest of the world as to be caressed on their own terms; and he that will not condescend to recommend himself by external embellishments must submit to the fate of just sentiment meanly expressed, and be ridiculed and forgotten before he is understood.

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.