To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

There is no dunce like a mature dunce.

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.