Upon laying a weight in one of the scales, inscribed eternity, though I threw in that of time, prosperity, affliction, wealth, and poverty, which seemed very ponderous, they were not able to stir the opposite balance.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

It is wonderful to see persons of sense passing away a dozen hours together in shuffling and dividing a pack of cards.

The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture.

Were a man's sorrows and disquietudes summed up at the end of his life, it would generally be found that he had suffered more from the apprehension of such evils as never happened to him than from those evils which had really befallen him.

What can that man fear who takes care to please a Being that is able to crush all his adversaries?

Among those evils which befall us, there are many which have been more painful to us in the prospect than by their actual pressure.