Physicians must discover the weaknesses of the human mind, and even condescend to humor them, or they will never be called in to cure the infirmities of the body.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us - never cease to instruct - never cloy.

Vanity finds in self-love so powerful an ally that it storms, as it were, by a coup de main,, the citadel of our heads, where, having blinded the two watchmen, it readily descends into the heart.

Life often presents us with a choice of evils, rather than of goods.

No one knows where he who invented the plow was born, nor where he died; yet he has done more for humanity than the whole race of heroes who have drenched the earth with blood and whose deeds have been handed down with a precision proportionate only to the mischief they wrought.

The true motives of our actions, like the real pipes of an organ, are usually concealed; but the gilded and hollow pretext is pompously placed in the front for show.

As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.