But St. Aubert had too much good sense to prefer a charm to a virtue.

There is some magic in wealth, which can thus make persons pay their court to it, when it does not even benefit themselves.

And since, in our passage through this world, painful circumstances occur more frequently than pleasing ones, and since our sense of evil is, I fear, more acute than our sense of good, we become the victims of our feelings, unless we can in some degree command them.

There are some few instances in which it is virtuous to disobey.

Such is the inconsistency of real love, that it is always awake to suspicion, however unreasonable; always requiring new assurances from the object of its interest.

One act of beneficence, one act of real usefulness, is worth all the abstract sentiment in the world.

Fate sits on these dark battlements and frowns, And as the portal opens to receive me, A voice in hollow murmurs through the courts Tells of a nameless deed.