The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

In private conversation between intimate friends, the wisest men very often talk like the weakest : for indeed the talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

Faith is kept alive in us, and gathers strength, more from practice than from speculations.

Men who cherish for women the highest respect are seldom popular with them.

The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas, as those of a fool are by his passions. The time of the one is long, because he does not know what to do with it; so is that of the other, because he distinguishes every moment of it with useful or amusing thoughts--or, in other words, because the one is always wishing it away, and the other always enjoying it.

A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.

They were a people so primitive they did not know how to get money, except by working for it.