Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties.
Those that have done nothing in life, are not qualified to judge of those that have done little.
Composition is for the most part an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.
When any fit of gloominess, or perversion of mind, lays hold upon you, make it a rule not to publish it by complaints.
Nothing can be truly great which is not right.
Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.
It is unpleasing to represent our affairs to our own disadvantage; yet it is necessary to shew the evils which we desire to be removed.
A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.
A translator is to be like his author; it is not his business to excel him.
What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known.
Man’s chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature.
Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.
In solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert.
A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot.
To a poet nothing can be useless.
Pride is a vice, which pride itself inclines every man to find in others, and to overlook in himself.
Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world.
The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things-the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.
Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.
Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.