The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things-the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

You need a good editor because every writer thinks he can write a War and Peace, but by the time he gets it on paper, it's not War and Peace anymore; it's comic-book stuff. Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Those who attempt nothing themselves think every thing easily performed, and consider the unsuccessful always as criminal.

There is such a difference between the pursuits of men in great cities that one part of the inhabitants lives to little other purpose than to wonder at the rest. Some have hopes and fears, wishes and aversions, which never enter into the thoughts of others, and inquiry is laboriously exerted to gain that which those who possess it are ready to throw away.

It is, however, not necessary, that a man should forbear to write, till he has discovered some truth unknown before; he may be sufficiently useful, by only diversifying the surface of knowledge, and luring the mind by a new appearance to a second view of those beauties which it had passed over inattentively before.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.