When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and courageous feelings, seek for no other rule to judge the event by; it is good and made by a good workman.

To make a book is as much a trade as to make a clock; something more than intelligence is required to become an author.

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

There is no business in the world so troublesome as the pursuit of fame: life is over before you have hardly begun your work.