Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future.

No one will persist long in helping someone who will not help themselves.

No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity.

By the consultation of books, whether of dead or living authors, many temptations to petulance and opposition, which occur in oral conferences, are avoided. An author cannot obtrude his service unasked, nor can be often suspected of any malignant intention to insult his readers with his knowledge or his wit. Yet so prevalent is the habit of comparing ourselves with others, while they remain within the reach of our passions, that books are seldom read with complete impartiality, but by those from whom the writer is placed at such a distance that his life or death is indifferent.

Among the calamities of war may be numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.

So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.

Inquiries into the heart are not for man.