Our griefs, as well as our joys, owe their strongest colors to our imaginations. There is nothing so grievous to be borne that pondering upon it will not make it heavier; and there is no pleasure so vivid that the animation of fancy cannot liven it.

The pure in heart are slow to credit calumnies, because they hardly comprehend what motives can be inducements to the alleged crimes.

Compulsion hardly restores right; love yields all things.

The doubts of love are never to be wholly overcome; they grow with its various anxieties, timidities, and tenderness, and are the very fruits of the reverence in which the admired object is beheld.

That grief is the most durable which flows inward, and buries its streams with its fountain, in the depths of the heart.

Goodness is equally hateful to the wicked, as vice is to the virtuous.

The only impregnable citadel of virtue is religion; for there is no bulwark of mere morality, which some temptation may not overtop or undermine, and destroy.