Constant companionship is not enjoyable, any more than constant eating. We sit too long at the table of friendship, when we outsit our appetites for each other's thoughts.

Affliction, like the iron-smith, shapes as it smites.

Nature has provided for the exigency of privation, by putting the measure of our necessities far below the measure of our wants. Our necessities are to our wants as Falstaff's pennyworth of bread to his any quantity of sack.

Qualities not regulated run into their opposites. Economy before competence is meanness after it. Therefore economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

All men are alike in their lower natures; it is in their higher characters that they differ.

Care, admitted as guest, quickly turns to be master.

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.