An ancient father says that a dog we know is better company than a man whose language we do not understand.

One may disavow and disclaim vices that surprise us and whereto our passions transport us. But those which by long habit are rooted in a strong and anchored in a powerful will are not subject to contradiction. Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies, which diverts us here and there.

Experience has further taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.

It is a small soul, buried beneath the weight of affairs, that does not know how to get clean away from them, that cannot put them aside and pick them up again.

It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it.

I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future.

Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace; there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being.