The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
-When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
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Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a straw.
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The value of several circumstances in story lessens very much by distance of time, though some minute circumstances are very valuable; and it requires great judgment in a writer to distinguish.
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A wise man endeavours, by considering all circumstances, to make conjectures and form conclusions; but the smallest accident intervening (and in the course of affairs it is impossible to foresee all) does often produce such turns and changes, that at last he is just as much in doubt of events as the most ignorant and inexperienced person.
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No preacher is listened to but Time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that older people have tried in vain to put into our heads before.
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Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Æneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors.
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It is in disputes as in armies, where the weaker side sets up false lights, and makes a great noise, to make the enemy believe them more numerous and strong than they really are.
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If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!
