No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.

Contempt is a kind of gangrene which, if it seizes one part of a character, corrupts all the rest by degrees.

"Uisce Beatha" is a compounded distilled spirit being drawn on aromatics, and the Irish sort is particularly distinguished for its pleasant and mild flavour.

Such is the constitution of Man that labor may be said to be its own re-ward.

Nothing detains the reader's attention more powerfully than deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune; and these might be abundantly afforded by memoirs of the sons of literature. They are entangled by contracts which they know not how to fulfill, and obliged to write on subjects which they do not understand. Every publication is a new period of time, from which some increase or declension of fame is to be reckoned. The gradations of a hero's life are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book.

Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.

...a man estimable for his learning, amiable for his life, and venerable for his piety. Arbuthnot was a man of great comprehension, skilful in his profession, versed in the sciences, acquainted with ancient literature, and able to animate his mass of knowledge by a bright and active imagination; a scholar with great brilliance of wit; a wit who, in the crowd of life, retained and discovered a noble ardour of religious zeal.