Melancholy sees the worst of things...[rather than the best]

There is a German proverb which says that Take-it-Easy and Live-Long are brothers.

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

Enthusiasm is the inspiration of everything great.

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?

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.

Pride is like the beautiful acacia, that lifts its head proudly above its neighbor plants-forgetting that it too, like them, has its roots in the dirt.