“Dream not...of having tasted all the grandeur & wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad.”

“There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours, but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writers digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour.”

“Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!”

“Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”

“The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.”

“A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.”

“Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.”