Love delights in paradoxes. Saddest when it has most reason to be gay, sighs are the signs of its deepest joy, and silence is the expression of its yearning tenderness.

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

As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

Fortune, like a coy mistress, loves to yield her favors, though she makes us wrest them from her.

It is some compensation for great evils, that they enforce great lessons.

A good thought is indeed a great boon, for which God is to be first thanked; next he who is the first to utter it, and then, in a lesser, but still in a considerable degree, the friend who is the first to quote it to us. Whoever adopts and circulates a just thought, participates in the merit that originated it.