From thee, great God, we spring, to thee we tend,--
Path, motive, guide, original, and end.
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.
"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."
A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.
Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.
Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.
I live in the crowd of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.
Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.
The first years of man must make provision for the last.
Example is always more efficacious than precept.
The endearing elegance of female friendship.
I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.
Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.
Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
The trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth.
His death eclipsed the gayety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.
That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.
He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.
What is read twice is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed.
Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties.
Wretched un-idea'd girls.
This man [Chesterfield], I thought, had been a lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among lords.
Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger at his death.
Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?