And panting Time toil'd after him in vain.

Our aspirations are our possibilities.

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.

The misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.

He said that few people had intellectual resources sufficient to forgo the pleasures of wine. They could not otherwise contrive how to fill the interval between dinner and supper.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

Avarice is a uniform and tractable vice; other intellectual distempers are different in different constitutions of mind. That which soothes the pride of one will offend the pride of another, but to the favor of the covetous bring money, and nothing is denied.