O Luxury! thou curst by Heaven's decree!

Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other.

Philosophy can add to our happiness in no other manner but by diminishing our misery; it should not pretend to increase our present stock, but make us economists of what we are possessed of. Happy were we all born philosophers; all born with a talent of thus dissipating our own cares by spreading them upon all mankind.

True genius walks along a line, and, perhaps, our greatest pleasure is in seeing it so often near falling, without being ever actually down.

Absence, like death, sets a seal on the image of those we love: we cannot realize the intervening changes which time may have effected.