The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.

He that sympathizes in all the happiness of others, perhaps himself enjoys the safest happiness.

Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.

If sensuality be our only happiness we ought to envy the brutes, for instinct is a surer, shorter, safer guide to such happiness than reason.

He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool; since the most absurd doctrines are not without such evidence as martyrdom can produce. A martyr, therefore, by the mere act of suffering, can prove nothing but his own faith.

We own almost all our knowledge not to those who have agreed but to those who have differed.

Self-denial is often the sacrifice of one sort of self-love for another.