He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

No man was ever great by imitation.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.

Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.

If, sir, men were all virtuous, I should with great alacrity teach them all to fly. But what would be the security of the good if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an army sailing through the clouds neither wall, nor mountains, nor seas could afford any security.

A voyage to the moon, however romantick and absurd the scheme may now appear, since the properties of air have been better understood, seemed highly probable to many of the aspiring wits in the last century