When any person of really eminent virtue becomes the object of envy, the clamor and abuse by which he is assailed is but the sign and accompaniment of his success in doing service to the public. And if he is a truly wise man, he will take no more notice of it than the moon does of the howling of the dogs. Her only answer to them is to shine on.

Even supposing there were some spiritual advantage in celibacy, it ought to be completely voluntary.

As hardly anything can accidentally touch the soft clay without stamping its mark on it, so hardly any reading can interest a child, without contributing in some degree, though the book itself be afterwards totally forgotten, to form the character.

Vices and frailties correct each other, like acids and alkalies. If each vicious man had but one vice, I do not know how the world could go on.

Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.

The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.

In our judgment of human transactions, the law of optics is reversed, we see most dimly the objects which are close around us.