The dangers gather as the treasures rise.
Gayety is to good-humor as perfumes to vegetable fragrance: the one overpowers weak spirits; the other recreates and revives them.
Good-humor is a state between gayety and unconcern, – the act or emanation of a mind at leisure to regard the gratification of another.
The business of life summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation.
One of the most pernicious effects of haste is obscurity.
No man hates him at whom he can laugh.
The heroes of literary history have been no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved.
All history was at first oral.
We must consider how very little history there is – I mean real, authentic history. That certain kings reigned and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the coloring, all the philosophy, of history is conjecture.
Hope is an amusement rather than a good, and adapted to none but very tranquil minds.
He that voluntarily continues in ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.
Ignorance cannot always be inferred from inaccuracy; knowledge is not always present.
A man, doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditation, or remote enquiries.
Any of us would kill a cow rather than not have beef.
Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding.
Everybody loves to have things which please the palate put in their way, without trouble or preparation.
The duty of criticism is neither to depreciate nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate.
A man has no more right to say an uncivil thing than to act one; no more right to say a rude thing to another than to knock him down.
Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one.
I know not, Madam, that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.