Man is naturally more desirous of a quiet and approving, than of a vigilant and tender conscience--more desirous of security than of safety.

Of all hostile feelings, envy is perhaps the hardest to be subdued, because hardly any one owns it even to himself, but looks out for one pretext after another to justify his hostility.

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 the flower is before the fruit, so is faith before good works.

The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.

Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising.

It is quite possible, and not uncommon, to read most laboriously, even so as to get by heart the words of a book, without really studying it at all,--that is, without employing the thoughts on the subject.