No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

All industry must be excited by hope.

To hear complaints with patience, even when complaints are vain, is one of the duties of friendship.

Men seldom give pleasure when they are not pleased themselves.

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

Even those to whom Providence has allotted greater strength of understanding can expect only to improve a single science.

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.