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

Few of those who fill the world with books, have any pretensions to the hope either of pleasing or instructing. They have often no other task than to lay two books before them, out of which they compile a third, without any new material of their own, and with very little application of judgment to those which former authors have supplied.

Security will produce danger.

Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.

Every man has something to do which he neglects, every man has faults to conquer which he delays to combat.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim; and when you are calculating, calculate.