The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day.

At the extreme north, the voyagers are obliged to dance and act plays for employment.

There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to our progress. Our life is frittered away by detail. I say let your affairs be as two or three, not a hundred or a thousand. And keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it.

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

I always see those of whom I have heard well with a slight disappointment. They are so much better than the great herd, and yet the heavens are not shivered into diamonds over their heads.