Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked. God sometimes sends a famine, sometimes a pestilence, and sometimes a hero, for the chastisement of mankind; none of them surely for our admiration.

We fancy we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.

Merit has rarely risen of itself, but a pebble or a twig is often quite sufficient for it to spring from to the highest ascent. There is usually some baseness before there is any elevation.

Clear writers, like fountains, do not seem so deep as they are; the turbid look the most profound.

Cruelty, if we consider it as a crime, is the greatest of all; if we consider it as a madness, we are equally justifiable in applying to it the readiest and the surest means of oppression.

The happiest of pillows is not that which love first presses! it is that which death has frowned on and passed over.

Authors are like cattle going to a fair: those of the same field can never move on without butting one another.