Men of great and shining qualities do not always succeed in life, but the fault lies more often in themselves than in others.

Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.

Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness; but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.

Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind.

He [the miser] falls down and worships the god of this world, but will have neither its pomps, its vanities nor its pleasures for his trouble.

Some indeed there are who profess to despise all flattery, but even these are nevertheless to be flattered, by being told that they do despise it.

We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do; therefore never go abroad in search of your wants; if they be real wants, they will come home in search of you; for he that buys what he does not want, will soon want what he cannot buy.