Providence has fixed the limits of human enjoyment by immovable boundaries, and has set different gratifications at such a distance from each other, that no art or power can bring them together. This great law it is the business of every rational being to understand, that life may not pass away in an attempt to make contradictions consistent, to combine opposite qualities, and to unite things which the nature of their being must always keep asunder.

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.

We may have uneasy feelings for seeing a creature in distress without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Reason and truth will prevail at last

This was a good dinner enough, to be sure, but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.

Mutual cowardice keeps us in peace.