Exert your talents, and distinguish yourself, and don't think of retiring from the world, until the world will be sorry that you retire.

All censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.

The life of a conscientious clergyman is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain. I would rather have chancery suits upon my hands than the cure of souls.

No writer can be fully convicted of imitation except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are copied.

Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.

That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind; not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.