The Orientals have another word for accident; it is "kismet,"--fate.

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.

The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.

The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

Boswell is the first of biographers.