An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

The present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.

There is a desire of property in the sanest and best men, which Nature seems to have implanted as conservative of her works, and which is necessary to encourage and keep alive the arts.

The highest price we can pay for anything, is to ask it.

The assailant is often in the right; the assailed is always.

Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition: never to be listened to, and to be listened to always.

A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

We oftener say things because we can say them well, than because they are sound and reasonable.

Of all cruelties those are the most intolerable that come under the name of condolence and consolation.

My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.