When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

History can be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever.

Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness and captivity would, without this comfort, be insupportable.

Beauty, without kindness, dies unenjoyed and undelighting.

The majority of a society is the true definition of the public.

To those who have lived long together, everything heard and everything seen recalls some pleasure communicated, some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life.

Hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords; but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain.