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

A man finds in the productions of nature an inexhaustible stock of material on which he can employ himself, without any temptations to envy or malevolence, and has always a certain prospect of discovering new reasons for adoring the sovereign author of the universe.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

No writer can be fully convicted of imitation except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are copied.

Confidence is a plant of slow growth; especially in an aged bosom

People in general do not willingly read if they have anything else to amuse them.

The necessary connexion of representatives with taxes, seems to have sunk deep into many of those minds, that admit sounds, without their meaning.