What pity is it That we can die, but once to serve our country.

Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant.

Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition.

We are apt to rely upon future prospects, and become really expensive while we are only rich in possibility. We live up to our expectations, not to our possessions, and make a figure proportionable to what we may be, not what we are.

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.

Some virtues are only seen in affliction and others only in prosperity.

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