The animadversions of critics are commonly such as may easily provoke the sedatest writer to some quickness of resentment and asperity of reply.

Much is due to those who first broke the way to knowledge, and left only to their successors the task of smoothing it.

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, - attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.

..to write and to live are very different. Many who praise virtue, do no more than praise it.

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

Good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains supremacy.