The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

We should round every day of stirring action with an evening of thought. We learn nothing of our experience except we muse upon it.

God has created too few unmixed evils to warrant the belief that death is one of them. In all things else in nature, goodness so abounds that we are authorized to infer that it does not stop even at the grave. It is only that her footprints have become invisible.

Hope is the best part of our riches. What sufficeth it that we have the wealth of the Indies in our pockets, if we have not the hope of heaven in our souls?

Great warriors, like great earthquakes, are principally remembered for the mischief they have done.

The loveliest faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy.

Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.