The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

Fire is the most tolerable third party

Most men cry better than they speak. You get more nurture out of them by pinching than addressing them.

For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.