Gratitude is like credit; it is the backbone of our relations; frequently we pay our debts not because equity demands that we should, but to facilitate future loans.

Nature seems at each man's birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.

There are certain people fated to be fools; they not only commit follies by choice, but are even constrained to do so by fortune.

The soul's maladies have their relapses like the body's. What we take for a cure is often just a momentary rally or a new form of the disease.

Good and bad fortune are found severally to visit those who have the most of the one or the other.

We may say of agreeableness, as distinct from beauty, that it consists in a symmetry of which we know not the rules, and a secret conformity of the features to each other, as also to the air and complexion of the person.

There are many predicaments in life that one must be a bit crazy to escape from.