An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty. Men who have practiced tortures on animals without pity, relating them without shame, how can they still hold their heads among human beings?

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.

I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

To excite opposition and inflame malevolence is the unhappy privilege of courage made arrogant by consciousness of strength.

Advice is offensive, not because it lays us open to unexpected regret, or convicts us of any fault which had escaped our notice, but because it shows us that we are known to others as well as to ourselves; and the officious monitor is persecuted with hatred, not because his accusation is false, but because he assumes that superiority which we are not willing to grant him, and has dared to detect what we desired to conceal.

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights.