Examples are few of men ruined by giving.

It is with charity as with money--the more we stand in need of it, the less we have to give away.

It is ever the invisible that is the object of our profoundest worship. With the lover it is not the seen but the unseen that he muses upon.

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

What is taken from the fortune, also, may haply be so much lifted from the soul. The greatness of a loss, as the proverb suggests, is determinable, not so much by what we have lost, as by what we have left.

Our first and last love is self-love.

Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do.