Almost all the moral good which is left among us is the apparent effect of physical evil.

You never find people laboring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful income.

Gaiety is to good-humor as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance. The one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them. Gaiety seldom fails to give some pain; good-humor boasts no faculties which every one does not believe in his own power, and pleases principally by not offending.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.

Though the discoveries or acquisitions of man are not always adequate to the expectations of his pride, they are at least sufficient to animate his industry.