Marriage enlarges the scene of our happiness and miseries. A marriage of love is pleasant; a marriage of interest, easy; and a marriage where both meet, happy. A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendship, all the enjoyments of sense and reason, and, indeed, all the sweets of life.

Vanity is the natural weakness of an ambitious man, which exposes him to the secret scorn and derision of those he converses with, and ruins the character he is so industrious to advance by it.

Devotion, when it does not lie under the check of reason, is apt to degenerate into enthusiasm.

Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object.

The moderns cannot reach their beauties, but can avoid their imperfections.

Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.

Charity is a virtue of the heart, and not of the hands.