Those that will not permit their wealth to do any good for others. . . cut themselves off from the truest pleasure here and the highest happiness later.

Vice has more martyrs than virtue; and it often happens that men suffer more to be lost than to be saved.

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.

How strange it is that we of the present day are constantly praising that past age which our fathers abused, and as constantly abusing that present age, which our children will praise.

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.

If all seconds were as averse to duels as their principals, very little blood would be shed in that way.

Life often presents us with a choice of evils, rather than of goods.