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.

Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her.

What is read twice is usually remembered more than what is once written.

When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency.

No evil is insupportable but that which is accompanied with consciousness of wrong.

In the motive lies the good or ill.

A minute analysis of life at once destroys that splendor which dazzles the imagination. Whatsoever grandeur can display, or luxury enjoy, is procured by offices of which the mind shrinks from the contemplation. All the delicacies of the table may be traced back to the shambles and the dunghill; all magnificence of building was hewn from the quarry, and all the pomp of ornament dug from among the damps and darkness of the mine.