I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues; and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals.

It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger.

If you are under obligations to many, it is prudent to postpone the recompensing of one, until it be in your power to remunerate all; otherwise you will make more enemies by what you give, than by what you withhold.

To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.

Wealth after all is a relative thing since he that has little and wants less is richer than he that has much and wants more.

How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy! In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age we are looking backward to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day when we have time.

When certain persons abuse us, let us ask ourselves what description of characters it is that they admire; we shall often find this a very consolatory question.