He that voluntarily continues in ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.

Advice is offensive, it shows us that we are known to others as well as to ourselves.

Man's chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature.

The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, were exterior appendages are cast aside, and men excel each other only by prudence and virtue.

False taste is always busy to mislead those that are entering upon the regions of learning; and the traveller, uncertain of his way, and forsaken by the sun, will be pleased to see a fainter orb arise on the horizon, that may rescue him from total darkness, though with weak and borrowed lustre.

I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.

In the bottle discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence.