Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

He that has too much to do will do something wrong.

I deny the lawfulness of telling a lie to a sick man for fear of alarming him; you have no business with consequences, you are to tell the truth.

You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.

When a poet mentions the spring, we know that the zephyrs are about to whisper, that the groves are to recover their verdure, the linnets to warble forth their notes of love, and the flocks and herds to frisk over vales painted with flowers: yet, who is there so insensible of the beauties of nature, so little delighted with the renovation of the world, as not to feel his heart bound at the mention of the spring?

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel.