No man can fall into contempt but those who deserve it.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; ad if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.

Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.

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.

The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.

Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.