A little knowledge is a dangerous thing – it only hastens fools to rush in where angels fear to tread.
It is to be steadily inculcated, that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness.
The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay.
No man should attempt to teach others what he has never learned himself.
It is astonishing that any man can forbear enquiring seriously whether there is a God; whether God is just; whether this life is the only state of existence.
Parents are by no means exempt from the intoxication of dominion.
Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving.
If you want to be a writer, then write. Write every day!
He that pines with hunger, is in little care how others shall be fed. The poor man is seldom studious to make his grandson rich.
He who fails to please in his salutation and address is at once rejected, and never obtains an opportunity of showing his latest excellences or essential qualities.
Shakespeare never had more than 6 lines together without a fault.
No knowledge is useless, with the exception of heraldry.
Celestial wisdom calms the mind.
Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination.
A voyage to the moon, however romantick and absurd the scheme may now appear, since the properties of air have been better understood, seemed highly probable to many of the aspiring wits in the last century.
As any custom is disused, the words that expressed it must perish with it; as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice.
Nothing concentrates one’s mind so much as the realization that one is going to be hanged in the morning!
Poetry cannot be translation.
It is our first duty to serve society, and after we have done that, we may attend wholly to the salvation of our own souls.
The worst evils are those that never arrive.