Our academical Pharisees. The dust and silence of the upper shelf. Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil. On Niccolo dei Machiavelli.
Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.
On Niccolo dei Machiavelli. On John Dryden. His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar. On John Dryden.