A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.

Living with a saint is more grueling than being one.

The cheerful live longest in years, and afterwards in our regards. Cheerfulness is the off-shoot of goodness.

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.

Marriage, by making us more contented, causes us often to be less enterprising.

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.

No single character is ever so great that a nation can afford to form itself upon it. Imitation belittles. This appears in the instance of the Chinese. The Chinese are so many Confucii; in miniature. And so with the Jews. Moses, the lawgiver, is poorly represented by Moses, the old clothesman ; or even by Dives, the hanker.