Fine clothes are good only as they supply the want of other means of procuring respect.

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

By the consultation of books, whether of dead or living authors, many temptations to petulance and opposition, which occur in oral conferences, are avoided. An author cannot obtrude his service unasked, nor can be often suspected of any malignant intention to insult his readers with his knowledge or his wit. Yet so prevalent is the habit of comparing ourselves with others, while they remain within the reach of our passions, that books are seldom read with complete impartiality, but by those from whom the writer is placed at such a distance that his life or death is indifferent.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

My diseases are an asthma and a dropsy and, what is less curable, seventy-five.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.