Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers and the sharpest thorns, as the heavens are sometimes overcast—alternately tempestuous and serene—so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasure and pain.

There are some men formed with feelings so blunt that they can hardly be said to be awake during the whole course of their lives.

Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue.

I do ride contend against the advantages of distrust. In the world we live in, it is but too necessary. Some of old called it the very sinews of discretion.

The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.