We seldom require more to the happiness of the present hour than to surpass him that stands next before us.

Most men are unwilling to be taught.

The uncertainty of death is, in effect, the great support of the whole system of life.

If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.

To buried merit rise the tardy bust.

Waste cannot be accurately told, though we are sensible how destructive it is. Economy, on the one hand, by which a certain income is made to maintain a man genteelly; and waste, on the other, by which on the same income another man lives shabbily, cannot be defined. It is a very nice thing; as one man wears his coat out much sooner than another, we cannot tell how.