The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention... It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

Nothing is more completely the child of art than a garden.

Do not Christians and Heathens, and Jews and Gentiles, and poets and philosophers, unite in allowing the starry influences?

Now, it is well known, that a man may with more impunity be guilty of an actual breach either of real good breeding or of good morals, than appear ignorant of the most minute point of fashionable etiquette.

The pith of conversation does not consist in exhibiting your own superior knowledge on matters of small consequence, but in enlarging, improving and correcting the information you possess by the authority of others.

When a man has not a good reason for doing a thing, he has one good reason for letting it alone.