The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles.

There is no greater enemy to those who would please than expectation.

We hold death, poverty, and grief for our principal enemies; but this death, which some repute the most dreadful of all dreadful things, who does not know that others call it the only secure harbor from the storm and tempests of life, the sovereign good of nature, the sole support of liberty, and the common and sudden remedy of all evils?

A man must learn to endure patiently what he cannot avoid conveniently.

Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.

He loves little who loves by rule.

I must use these great men's virtues as a cloak for my weakness.