A good disposition is more valuable than gold, for the latter is the gift of fortune, but the former is the dower of nature.

Every man in the time of courtship and in the first entrance of marriage, puts on a behavior like my correspondent's holiday suit.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind

That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?

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.

There is nobody so weak of invention that cannot make some little stories to villify his enemy.

There is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than gratitude. It is accompanied with such an inward satisfaction that the duty is sufficiently rewarded by the performance