Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism; and excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness. The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.

Our first and last love is self-love.

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

Hope is the best part of our riches.

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

Ideas are like matter, infinitely divisible. It is not given to us to get down so to speak to their final atoms, but to their molecular groupings-the way is never ending and the progress infinitely delightful and profitable.