This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery.

I live in the crowd of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.

Ease, a neutral state between pain and pleasure ... if it is not rising into pleasure will be falling towards pain.

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.

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.