A small country town is not the place in which one would choose to quarrel with a wife; every human being in such places is a spy.

The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout.

How few of his friends' houses would a man choose to be at when he is sick.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; ad if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.

Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it. It should not be suffered to tyrannize in the imagination, to raise phantoms of horror, or to beset life with supernumerary distresses.

Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.