We may take Fancy for a companion, but must follow Reason as our guide.

None but those who have learned the art of subjecting their senses as well as reason to hypothetical systems can be persuaded by the most specious rhetorician that the lots of life are equal; yet it cannot be denied that every one has his peculiar pleasures and vexations, that external accidents operate variously upon different minds, and that no man can exactly judge from his own sensations what another would feel in the same circumstances.

He was so generally civil, that nobody thanked him for it.

Art hath an enemy called ignorance.

Whoever envies another confesses his superiority.

Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without very accurate inquiry whether it is right. It is sufficient that another is growing great in his own eyes at our expense, and assumes authority over us without our permission; for many would contentedly suffer the consequences of their own mistakes, rather than the insolence of him who triumphs as their deliverer.

The business of life summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation.