God will excuse our prayers for ourselves whenever we are prevented from them by being occupied in such good works as to entitle us to the prayers of others.

That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind.

Too high an appreciation of our own talents is the chief cause why experience preaches to us all in vain.

As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm, the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same.

God is on the side of virtue; for whoever dreads punishment suffers it, and whoever deserves it, dreads it .

Human foresight often leaves its proudest possessor only a choice of evils.

Posthumous fame is a plant of tardy growth, for our body must be the seed of it; or we may liken it to a torch, which nothing but the last spark of life can light up; or we may compare it to the trumpet of the archangel, for it is blown over the dead; but unlike that awful blast, it is of earth, not of heaven, and can neither rouse nor raise us.