The worst thing that can be said of the most powerful is that they can take your life; but the same can be said of the most weak.

The seat of perfect contentment is in the head; for every individual is thoroughly satisfied with his own proportion of brains.

The avarice of the miser may be termed the grand sepulchral of all his other passions, as they successively decay.

Sensibility would be a good portress if she had but one hand; with her right she opens the door to pleasure, but with her left to pain.

Revenge is fever in our own blood, to be cured only by letting the blood of another; but the remedy too often produces a relapse, which is remorse--a malady far more dreadful than the first disease, because it is incurable.

The hand that unnerved Belshazzar derived its most horrifying influence from the want of a body, and death itself is not formidable in what we do know of it, but in what we do not.

Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.