While an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his worst performance; and when he is dead, we rate him by his best.

Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

The gloomy and the resentful are always found among those who have nothing to do or who do nothing.

Knowledge is praised and desired by multitudes whom her charms could never rouse from the couch of sloth; whom the faintest invitation of pleasure draws away from their studies; to whom any other method of wearing the day is more eligible than the use of books, and who are more easily engaged by any conversation than such as may rectify their notions or enlarge their comprehension.

Of those that spin out trifles and die without a memorial, many flatter themselves with high opinions of their own importance, and imagine that they are every day adding some improvement to human life.

Presumption will be easily corrected; but timidity is a disease of the mind more obstinate and fatal.