We never could clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing.

No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.

In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.

Reform, that we may preserve.

A page digested is better than a volume hurriedly read.

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.

All the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings.