Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.

Habit is the cement of society, the comfort of life, and, alas! The root of error.

The mind's eye is perhaps no better fitted for the full radiance of truth, than is the body's for that of the sun.

If the human mind naturally produces noisome weeds, it also produces flowers and fruit; and ... the best method to mend the soil in general, is for each of us to cultivate his own particular spot.

There is scarce any passion so heartily decried by moralists and satirists, as AMBITION; and yet, methinks, ambition is not a vice but in a vicious mind: in a virtuous mind it is a virtue, and will be found to take its color from the character in which it is mixed. Ambition is a desire of superiority; and a man may become superior, either by making others less or himself greater.

Have you never seen a strange unconnected deformed representation of a figure, which seen in another point of view, became proportioned and agreeable? It is the picture of man.

There are sometimes beauties in a character which would never have appeared but for a defect, and defects which would never have appeared but for a beauty.