Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.

...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.

The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.

He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.