Hope is an amusement rather than a good, and adapted to none but very tranquil minds.

To grieve for evils is often wrong; but it is much more wrong to grieve without them. All sorrow that lasts longer than its cause is morbid, and should be shaken off as an attack of melancholy, as the forerunner of a greater evil than poverty or pain.

As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs, so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas.

The great effect of friendship is beneficence, yet by the first act of uncommon kindness it is endangered.

Every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incitement to transgress its precepts.

The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.

The fortitude which has encountered no dangers, that prudence which has surmounted no difficulties, that integrity which has been attacked by no temptation, can at best be considered but as gold not yet brought to the test, of which therefore the true value cannot be assigned.