These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.

There is nothing against which an old man should be so much upon his guard as putting himself to nurse.

Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness as well as virtue consists in mediocrity.

I believe it will be found that those who marry late are best pleased with their children; and those who marry early, with their partners.

The triumph of hope over experience.

If a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may perhaps not feel again the inclination.

Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals, or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other.