A country governed by a despot is an inverted cone.
The richest author that ever grazed the common of literature.
New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.
It is man’s own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.
Hunting was the labour of the savages of North America, but the amusement of the gentlemen of England.
Sir, if a man has a mind to prance, he must study at Christ Church and All Souls.
Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else.
Good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains supremacy.
Nay, Sir, those who write in them, write well, in order to be paid well.
I advised Chambers, and would advise every young man beginning to compose, to do it as fast as he can, to get a habit of having his mind to start promptly; it is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy.
It is much easier not to write like a man than to write like a woman.
I look upon this as I did upon the Dictionary: it is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of.
A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre.
He who writes much will not easily escape a manner, such a recurrence of particular modes as may be easily noted.
New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.
Allegories drawn to great length will always break.
It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit; he that has once studiously developed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.
In this work are exhibited, in a very high degree, the two most engaging powers of an author. New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.
There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have done everything by chance.
Too much nicety of detail disgusts the greatest part of readers, and to throw a multitude of particulars under general heads, and lay down rules of extensive comprehension, is to common understandings of little use.