If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be not a virtue, but the groundwork of virtue.

To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy.

Sir, he throws away his money without thought and without merit. I do not call a tree generous that sheds its fruit at every breeze.

A married man has many cares, but a bachelor no pleasures.

I do not care to speak ill of a man behind his back, but I believe he is an attorney.

Many of our miseries are merely comparative: we are often made unhappy, not by the presence of any real evil, but by the absence of some fictitious good; of something which is not required by any real want of nature, which has not in itself any power of gratification, and which neither reason nor fancy would have prompted us to wish, did we not see it in the possession of others.