The mind is like a trunk: if well-packed, it holds almost every thing; if ill-packed, next to nothing.

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life. Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.

Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.

Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order.

We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness.

Who is fit to govern others? He who governs himself. You might as well have said: nobody.

The body too has its rights; and it will have them: they cannot be trampled on without peril. The body ought to be the soul's best friend. Many good men however have neglected to make it such: so it has become a fiend and has plagued them.