The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.

My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream.

Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.

As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers.

At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.

Families are always rising and falling in America.

Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them.