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

Luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksand, poverty or chains.

The ingenuity of self-deception is inexhaustible.

Did not God Sometimes withhold in mercy what we ask, We should be ruined at our own request.

Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.

Our infinite obligations to God do not fill our hearts half as much as a petty uneasiness of our own; nor His infinite perfections as much as our smallest wants.

My retirement was now become solitude; the former is, I believe, the best state for the mind of man, the latter almost the worst. In complete solitude, the eye wants objects, the heart wants attachments, the understanding wants reciprocation. The character loses its tenderness when it has nothing to strengthen it, its sweetness when it has nothing to soothe it.