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.

Society is indeed a contract. ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.

We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.

Of this stamp is the cant of, Not men, but measures.

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.

The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all temporal encouragements to virtue; and it is a mark of an abandoned spirit to have no regard to it.

When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to effect it, the idea is grand.