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.'

We are growing serious, and, let me tell you, that's the very next step to being dull.

Most of the trades, professions, and ways of living among mankind, take their original either from the love of the pleasure, or the fear of want. The former, when it becomes too violent, degenerates into luxury, and the latter into avarice.

True benevolence or compassion, extends itself through the whole of existence and sympathizes with the distress of every creature capable of sensation.

Justice discards party, friendship, kindred, and is always, therefore, represented as blind.

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.

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