Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.

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

Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was a business; but now, when great fortunes are only made by business, business is war.

Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, doubt (called by Galileo the father of invention), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins?

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

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man's life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!