He said that few people had intellectual resources sufficient to forgo the pleasures of wine. They could not otherwise contrive how to fill the interval between dinner and supper.

When a man marries a widow his jealousies revert to the past: no man is as good as his wife says her first husband was

To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.

Piety practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendor of beneficence.

To a people warlike and indigent, an incursion into a rich country is never hurtful.

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

As the mind must govern the hands, so in every society the man of intelligence must direct the man of labor.