There is no being so poor and so contemptible, who does not think there is somebody still poorer, and still more contemptible.

Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.

"I fly from pleasure," said the prince, "because pleasure has ceased to please; I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others."

...it will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor.

For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws.

To dread no eye and to suspect no tongue is the great prerogative of innocence--an exemption granted only to invariable virtue.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.