I am sorry I have not learnt to play at cards. It is very useful in life: it generates kindness, and consolidates society.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.

Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.

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

Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge, and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things, when they are shown their form or told their use.

The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.