"Example is always more efficacious than precept."
"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind."
"Music is the only sensual pleasure without vice."
"The business of the poet, said Imlac, is to examine, not the individual, but the species."
"Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself."
"Few things are impossible to diligence and skill."
"Abstinence is as easy to me, as temperance would be difficult."
"When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality."
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it."
"An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere."
"All intellectual improvement arises from leisure."
"It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends."
"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."
"Our aspirations are our possibilities."
"Round numbers are always false."
"Tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
"72 Lectures were once useful; but now, when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary. If your attention fails, and you miss a part of a lecture, it is lost; you cannot go back as you do upon a book. . . People have nowadays got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shown. You may teach chymistry by lectures. You might teach making shoes by lectures!"
"Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding."
"Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things."
"Actions are visible, though motives are secret."
"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."
"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
"Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
"It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust."
"1–Jan–91 Network. Anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections."