A person loves to review his own mind. That is the use of a diary, or journal.

In all pleasures hope is a considerable part.

I know not anything more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.

Every reader should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence, and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible

Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery; yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable.

To forget, or pretend to do so, to return a borrowed article, is the meanest sort of petty theft.