Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

It was the maxim, I think, of Alphonsus of Aragon, that dead counsellors are safest. The grave puts an end to flattery and artifice, and the information we receive from books is pure from interest, fear, and ambition. Dead counsellors are likewise most instructive, because they are heard with patience and with reverence.

All envy is proportionate to desire; we are uneasy at the attainments of another, according as we think our own happiness would be advanced by the addition of that which he withholds from us.

Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity.

Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.

What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known.

Deviation from Nature is deviation from happiness.