“Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.”

“To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid - one must also be polite.”

“He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.”

“Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours. ”

“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.”

“Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.”

“The only reward to be expected from the cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and and hatred if one succeeds.”