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

Spite and ill-nature are among the most expensive luxuries in life.

Social sorrow loses half its pain.

That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

Men seldom give pleasure when they are not pleased themselves.

Curiosity is the thirst of the soul.

Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine that he possesses some qualities, superior, either in kind or degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world; and, whatever apparent disadvantages he may suffer in the comparison with others, he has some invisible distinctions, some latent reserve of excellence, which he throws into the balance, and by which he generally fancies that it is turned in his favour.