Pleasure is by much the most laborious trade I know, especially for those who have not a vocation to it.

Gentleness is the outgrowth of benignity.

Indeed, I have, alas! outlived almost every one of my contemporaries. One pays dear for living long.

Temptation does not make the sin, it lies ready in the heart.

Long habit so reconciles us to almost any thing, that the grossest improprieties cease to strike us when they once make a part of the common course of action.

it may be in morals as it is in optics, the eye and the object may come too close to each other, to answer the end of vision. There are certain faults which press too near our self-love to be even perceptible to us.

There is one single fact that one may oppose to all the wit and argument of infidelity; namely, that no man ever repented of being a Christian on his death-bed.