Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

Human happiness has always its abatements; the brightest sunshine of success is not without a cloud.

Enlarge my life with multitude of days, In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays; Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know, That life protracted is protracted woe. Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy.

...a common observation, that few are mended by imprisonment, and that he, whose crimes have made confinement necessary, seldom makes any other use of his enlargement, than to do, with greater cunning, what he did before with less.

You cannot, by all the lecturing in the world, enable a man to make a shoe.

Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained

All is not gold that glitters, as we have often been told; and the adage is verified in your place and my favour; but if what happens does not make us richer, we must bid it welcome, if it makes us wiser.