The prudent person may direct a state, but it is the enthusiast who regenerates or ruins it

More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye.

When you borrow on your character, it is your character that you leave in pawn.

Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud--and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.

In belief lies the secret of all valuable exertion.

Nothing ages like laziness.

Punctuality is the stern virtue of men of business, and the graceful courtesy of princes.