He that can please nobody is not so much to be pitied as he that nobody can please.

The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal.

Fashions smile has given wit to dullness and grace to deformity, and has brought everything into vogue, by turns, but virtue.

We know the effects of many things, but the cause of few; experience, therefore, is a surer guide than imagination, and inquiry than conjecture.

She is deceitful as the calm that precedes the hurricane, smooth as the water on the verge of the cataract, and beautiful as the rainbow, that smiling daughter of the storm; but, like the mirage in the desert, she tantalizes us with a delusion that distance creates, and that contiguity destroys.

Sleep, the type of death, is also, like that which it typifies, restricted to the earth. It flies from hell and is excluded from heaven.

There is this paradox in pride - it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so.