Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less.

Do you want to know the man against whom you have most reason to guard yourself? Your looking-glass will give you a very fair likeness of his face.

If all our wishes were gratified, most of our pleasures would be destroyed.

The Eastern monarch who proclaimed a reward to him who should discover a new pleasure, would have deserved well of mankind had he stipulated that it should be blameless.

As there are dim-sighted people who live in a sort of perpetual twilight, so there are some who, having neither much clearness of head nor a very elevated tone of morality, are perpetually haunted by suspicions of everybody and everything.

When a man says he wants to work, what he means is that he wants wages.

Great affectation and great absence of it are at first sight very similar.