Many actions calculated to procure fame are not conducive to ultimate happiness.

Beauty commonly produces love, but cleanliness preserves it. Age itself is not unamiable while it is preserved clean and unsullied; like a piece of metal constantly kept smooth and bright, we look on it with more pleasure than on a new vessel cankered with rust.

Modesty is not only an ornament, but also a guard to virtue.

Plutarch says very finely that a man should not allow himself to hate even his enemies.

Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.

A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.

I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: 'What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.'