"The causes of good and evil are so various and uncertain, so often entangled with each other, so diversified by various relations, and so much subject to accidents which cannot be foreseen, that he who would fix his condition upon incontestable reasons of preference must live and die inquiring and deliberating."

"In the assembly, where you passed the last night, there appeared such spriteliness of air, and volatility of fancy, as might have suited beings of an higher order, formed to inhabit serener regions inaccessible to care or sorrow. Yet, believe me, there was not one who did not dread the moment when solitude should deliver him to the tyranny of reflection."

"Knowledge is more than equivalent to force. The master of mechanicks laughs at strength."

"Few things are impossible to diligence and skill."

"A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected."

"Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed."

"The poet must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place."

"To a poet nothing can be useless."

"Nothing ... will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome."

"I fly from pleasure," said the prince, "because pleasure has ceased to please; I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others."

"This singularity of his humour made him much observed."

"Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia."

"We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know, because they have never deceived us."

"The act of writing itself distracts the thoughts, and what is read twice is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed."

"He that thinks with more extent than another will want words of larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies? Yet vanity inclines us to find faults any where rather than in ourselves. He that reads and grows no wiser, seldom suspects his own deficiency; but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood?"

"It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. ... Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction."

"Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression. The jest which is expected is already destroyed."

"Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks. The flowers which scatter their odours from time to time in the paths of life, grow up without culture from seeds scattered by chance. Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment."

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

"Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is, therefore, become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick. Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement."

"The joy of life is variety; the tenderest love requires to be renewed by intervals of absence."

"I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lies."

"Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages."

"Slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty."

"It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm."

"PENSION — An allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country."

"PATRON — One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is repaid in flattery."

"OATS — A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people."

"NETWORK — Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections."

"LEXICOGRAPHER — A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge."

"GRUBSTREET — The name of a street near Moorsfield, London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems."

"EXCISE — A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid."

"ESSAY — A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition."

"CLUB — An assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions."

"It is the fate of those, who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries, whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science, the pioneer of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths through which Learning and Genius press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few."

"Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language."

"I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote."

"But, perhaps, the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in few words."

"Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession, and he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain is no less an enemy to his quiet than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony."

"But the truth is, that no man is much regarded by the rest of the world, except where the interest of others is involved in his fortune. The common employments or pleasures of life, love or opposition, loss or gain, keep almost every mind in perpetual agitation. If any man would consider how little he dwells upon the condition of others, he would learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself."

"Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition."

"The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight."

"That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?"

"No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority."

"Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble."

"No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library."

"No man is much pleased with a companion, who does not increase, in some respect, his fondness for himself."

"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect."

"In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it."

"To convince any man against his will is hard, but to please him against his will is justly pronounced by Dryden to be above the reach of human abilities."