Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions

The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another; and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture.

Admiration must be continued by that novelty which first produces it; and how much soever is given, there must always be reason to imagine that more remains.

It is as bad as bad can be: it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree. We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

Many of our miseries are merely comparative: we are often made unhappy, not by the presence of any real evil, but by the absence of some fictitious good; of something which is not required by any real want of nature, which has not in itself any power of gratification, and which neither reason nor fancy would have prompted us to wish, did we not see it in the possession of others.

Whoever rises above those who once pleased themselves with equality, will have many malevolent gazers at his eminence.