No degree of knowledge attainable by man is able to set him above the want of hourly assistance.

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

This man [Chesterfield], I thought, had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords.

That distrust which intrudes so often on your mind is a mode of melancholy, which, if it be the business of a wise man to be happy, it is foolish to indulge; and if it be a duty to preserve our faculties entire for their proper use, it is criminal. Suspicion is very often an useless pain.

No estimate is more in danger of erroneous calculations than those by which a man computes the force of his own genius.

All censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.

Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.

A thousand years may elapse before there shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope.

As the mind must govern the hands, so in every society the man of intelligence must direct the man of labor.