Whatever professes to benefit by pleasing must please at once. The pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected; that which elevates must always surprise.

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

Men are most powerfully affected by those evils which themselves feel, or which appear before their own eyes.

Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

Books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction: memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.

Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises.