Frequent discontent must proceed from frequent hardships.

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected; and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an individual weight of calumny will be super-added.

Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.

Few moments are more pleasing than those in which the mind is concerting measures for a new undertaking.

Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say.

To dread no eye and to suspect no tongue is the great prerogative of innocence--an exemption granted only to invariable virtue.