To neglect at any time preparation for death is to sleep on our post at a siege; to omit it in old age is to sleep at an attack.

It is justly considered as the greatest excellency of art to imitate nature; but it is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature which are most proper for imitation: greater care is still required in representing life, which is so often discoloured by passion or deformed by wickedness. If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account; or why it may not be as safe to turn the eye immediately upon mankind, as upon a mirror which shows all that presents itself without discrimination.

Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility.

Such is the uncertainty of human affairs, that security and despair are equal follies; and as it is presumption and arrogance to anticipate triumphs, it is weakness and cowardice to prog-nosticate miscarriages.

All history was at first oral.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

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