Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.

There is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy.

I will follow the right side even to the fire, but excluding the fire if I can.

Once you have decided to keep a certain pile, it is no longer yours; for you can't spend it.

I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and reason, as the worst of all the vices. But then I am so soft in this that I cannot seea chicken's neck wrung without distress, and cannot bear to hear the squealing of a hare between the teeth of my hounds.

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things, and one part is no less necessary than the other.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves by railing at it; and yet it is not absolutely railing against anything, to proclaim its defects, because they are in all things to be found, how beautiful or how much to be coveted soever.