Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.

There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.

It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.

The easy, gentle, and sloping path . . . is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

When we have got it, we want something else.

I was not long since in a company where I was not who of my fraternity brought news of a kind of pills, by true account, composed of a hundred and odd several ingredients; whereat we laughed very heartily, and made ourselves good sport; for what rock so hard were able to resist the shock or withstand the force of so thick and numerous a battery?

Traveling through the world produces a marvelous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose. This great world is a mirror where we must see ourselves in order to know ourselves. There are so many different tempers, so many different points of view, judgments, opinions, laws and customs to teach us to judge wisely on our own, and to teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness.